


Over on the Mountain (Here Tonight)

by akamarykate



Series: Early Edition Air Crash Investigators AU [2]
Category: Early Edition (TV)
Genre: AU, Air Crash Investigators AU, Airplane Crashes, Friendship, Huddling For Warmth, Team Bonding, a tale of two idiots and their stupid faces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamarykate/pseuds/akamarykate
Summary: "Look, Hobson, if you don't want to admit you're psychic, or intuitive, or just plain good at your job, that's your problem, not mine," Toni said. "What is my problem is that we're stranded on a mountain with a blizzard coming on. I need you to use your whatever-you-want-to-call-it to get us out of here."
Relationships: Toni Brigatti/Gary Hobson
Series: Early Edition Air Crash Investigators AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2122518
Comments: 11
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amilyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amilyn/gifts).



> _Edited post-reveals_ : This AU is an offshoot of/companion story to [Pilot Project](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13047810/chapters/29844900), a gift the recipient received in a previous Yuletide and requested a follow up to in this year's sign up. It isn't essential to read Pilot Project before you read this. 
> 
> Many thanks to the best and speediest beta I know, Jayne L.

"Aren't you tired of trying to figure this out?"  


Marissa took a sip from her coffee, trying to sort out her response. She liked talking to Gary about most things, but they'd been going around in circles for weeks now about something he couldn't even begin to accept, and it was frustrating. "I wish I could be more help, but I'm certainly not tired of listening to you."  


Gary sighed, and his voice was muffled when he said, "You should be. I am. I hate this. Almost as much as I hate myself for having the problem in the first place."  


"I don't hate you." Thank goodness they were alone in the break room; it afforded them more privacy than the bullpen for this therapy session. Or whatever it was. "I'm just trying to make sense of what you're telling me. Last month your cat showed up when we were on site in Charleston and you knew about the crack in the Lear's piston before we found the engine. You figured out what caused that cargo plane to crash in Geneva last week because you saw a news story about it. And instead of telling Crumb or the Swiss investigators what you knew and how you knew it, you set up an anonymous email so you could tip them off to the problem with the hydraulics?"  


Gary sighed. "Pretty much."  


"'Pretty much'? What am I missing?"  


"Nothing." His fingers tapped out a staccato rhythm on the fake wood table. "Except the cat."  


"Your cat?"  


"It isn't my cat!" His exclamation was so loud it made her jump. Even her guide dog, Reilly, who'd been snoozing under the table, lifted his head, nudging her shin to see if he was needed. Gary must have noticed, because he lowered his voice when he admitted, "But yeah. It showed up on my front porch that night. It was in my house when I saw the story on the news. Started yowling when someone they interviewed mentioned the landing gears not being the problem, and I—" He grunted. He really did hate this. "I saw it. Like there was a cross-section of a Carlsair 430 that flashed on my TV screen with a red arrow pointing to the spot where the hydraulic line ran past that vent and I could just….I could just _see_ a screw popping loose from the vent and slicing the line."  


"That's—"  


"I _know_." He sounded utterly miserable.  


This wasn't the first time he'd connected the cat to a sudden flash of insight he'd had about an investigation. It had been happening since early fall, and now, in the depths of January, she was starting to recognize the pattern of his whining about it, if nothing else. "If it helps you understand an investigation, that's a good thing, no matter where it comes from."  


The break room door slid open and feet shuffled in. Heavy enough to be male, but she didn't recognize whose, so they weren't Zeke Crumb's, the head of their unit. Still, Gary bent his head close to hers. She could feel his breath brush her cheek when he said, "Believe me, I know how it sounds. I don't really believe it myself, and I'm the one who has to live with it."  


"But an anonymous tip, Gary? What if they trace it back to you? You could lose your job!"  


"What do you think'll happen if I tell Crumb the truth? I can't even do that. I don't know the truth, do I? I don't know where this is coming from. Marissa, you can't tell anyone. They won't just fire me, they'll lock me up!"  


The vending machine whirred, delivering whatever snack the man who'd come in selected, and his footsteps took him back out the door. Marissa reached toward Gary and dropped a hand on his arm. "I promise, I don't think you're crazy. And I won't tell anyone, not unless keeping this secret is going to hurt you somehow." She took a deep breath, knowing what he needed to hear and trying to be sure she could be honest when she said, "I believe you, whatever this is. I told you about my Aunt Delia and her palm reading business, right?"  


"Right." That put a note in his voice that sounded like a smile, however brief and wary. "How she helped people solve their problems. But she was just pretending to be psychic, wasn't she?"  


Marissa shrugged and took another sip of coffee. "With Aunt Delia, you never know. The point is, she did help."  


"And turned into the neighborhood weirdo in the process, I bet."  


"Why are you afraid of seeming weird?" She didn't bother to point out that he already did, a lot of the time, to a lot of people. One in particular, who'd been asking her what was up with Gary Hobson for a few weeks now. "What can it hurt?"  


"My chances for advancement, for one thing. If Crumb hears about this he'll never make me IIC again. I tell you what, next time I see that cat, I'm not feeding him or inviting him inside, that's for sure."  


"If you don't follow this source of information, wherever it's coming from—" She paused for what she hoped was an unnoticeable half-second and tucked a sudden theory away for further thought. "--and solve the cases you can solve, do you deserve to be an investigator? If you don't use this for good, you're refusing to help families like yours."  


His voice tightened. "That's not fair."  


"Isn't it?" In point of fact, it was both honest and fair, something she'd tried to be for him when he felt sorry for himself after his wife had left him. It was why they'd become friends. She waited, listening to him squirm uncomfortably, until he let out another grunt, this one an acknowledgment. "I won't tell you who to tell, or when. But you've been handed what seems like a pretty useful tool for this job, and you're too good an investigator, too good a person, not to use it to do the right thing."  


The door slid open again, and this time the footsteps came with a voice. "Hey Marissa. Hey, Gary."  


"Hi Miguel," Marissa said over Gary's third grunt. "How's everything down in the basement?"  


He opened the refrigerator and pushed buttons on the microwave. "Peaches and cream. They got me analyzing the black box from Europa 679, that cargo plane that went down in Geneva last week? Their tech people sent it here for a second opinion."  


"Really?" she said, trying to keep the deadpan note out of her voice while she nudged Gary's ankle with her foot. "EASA don't know what happened? I thought they were looking at the landing gear."  


"They were, but it turns out whatever happened went wrong quite a ways out from the airport. The landing gear weren't even engaged at that point. There's this noise at oh-seven-hundred-and-fifty-three that they want me to isolate and analyze, and Gissler told me they got some kind of anonymous tip about the hydraulics." The microwave beeped. "Mind if I join you guys?"  


"Please do," she said over grunt number four. She delivered a slightly firmer kick to Gary's ankle.  


Miguel chatted through mouthfuls of his amazing-smelling lunch about the various cases they were all working, Gary and Marissa as investigators, and Miguel as tech support, and his latest side project, a drone that could reach wrecks in locations that were unreachable by other means, collecting data before weather and time erased it. "Still have a lot of work to do on the cameras, but I'm going to get something in there that can withstand hurricanes, sandstorms, you name it. We'll be able to tell how many bolts are missing by the time I get the Ojo de Dios 2.0 perfected."  


"The Eye of God?"  


"It's a working title. It's not offensive, is it? I just call it the ODD for short."  


"Sounds good to me. Gary?"  


Grunt number five, and she was just about damn done with him.  


"What's your problem today, Hobson?" Miguel asked. "Cat got your tongue?"  


Marissa nearly spat out her coffee.  


"It's not my cat!" Gary protested.  


"When did you get a cat?" Miguel asked. The break room door slid open again, and the footsteps that followed were sharper, lighter, than any that had come before.  


"Toni?" Marissa asked.  


"Right here." Toni Brigatti's footsteps clipped over to their table. "This a private party, or can anyone join?"  


"Anyone except Hobson's cat, it seems," Miguel said.  


Gary stood up so abruptly the table rattled. "I don't have a cat," he muttered fiercely, and stomped out of the room.  


"What's his problem?" Toni asked, not for the first time.  


"Beats me," Miguel said. "Seems like he has something on his mind."  


Marissa gave her most innocent shrug. "I'm sure he'll tell you eventually."

* * *

A few days later, Gary's grumpy mood still hadn't lifted, though he did bring Marissa a cinnamon latte from Compass Coffee. He half-sat on her desk while she tried to work, but she was half an hour out from a conference call with EASA about Europa 679 that Miguel had asked her sit in on, and it wasn't as if she could concentrate on anything else, not with the mysterious tipster squatting in her cubby and feeding clandestine treats to her guide dog.  


"You swear to me you won't tell them I sent that email. And not a word about the cat," Gary said.  


She sighed. "Of course I won't. But I really think you should."  


"We've been over this before."  


"Mmm-hmmm." And he still wouldn't acknowledge that she might possibly be right. She didn't see how he could keep going like this, not with it consuming so much of his thoughts that he couldn't talk about anything else, despite all his claims that he didn't want to talk about it. In another life, one where she had stayed on course to become a counselor and not stumbled into this line of work, he might have been her client instead of her best friend. So she put on her therapist's hat and finally gave voice to the theory she'd been mulling over since their last chat about this in the break room. "Have you considered that these insights of yours might not be coming from the cat? Maybe he's grounding you."  


"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"  


"It's possible that these sudden ideas you're having about the causes of crashes are your own. You've always been at your best when you can see the big picture, but you've never been happy that your process is different from everyone else's. This is your way of reconciling your process to your belief that there's nothing abnormal about you."  


"There's not!"  


"I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it's different. You see and understand crash sites and data differently, but you push your own insights away because you're afraid of what they might mean. When you pet the cat, it relaxes you, and removes the interference you create around your own intuition."  


He leaned in, so close she could smell the coffee on his breath. "Let me tell you something, those flashes or whatever they are, they aren't coming from my brain. 

They're not coming from me."  


"You don't want to accept it." She had her theories about that, too, but they had to do with losing his sister in an airline crash when he was twelve, and he obviously wasn't ready for that deep a dive into his psyche. "That's natural, Gary. It's unsettling to admit that you don't understand how something works, especially when that something is you."  


"Oh, I know everything I need to know about how I work." He straightened up, away from her, but still perched on her desk. "And another thing, petting that cat doesn't relax me."  


"Obviously."  


"Because I don't pet that cat at all!"  


"You don't pet your cat?" Winslow asked. He'd been walking by, the customary flip-flop of his loafers almost unnoticed because Gary was being so intense.

"Maybe you should," Marissa offered.  


"It's not my cat!"  


"Oooookay," Winslow drawled. "Marissa, don't forget we're going over the interviews from PanGlobal 1045 later."  


"Don't worry, I'll have notes. I'm listening to them right now."  


"Thanks, ace."  


"'Ace'?" Gary asked as Winslow walked away. "What kind of nickname is that?"  


"Unimaginative, but well-intentioned. Stop that," she added when he grunted. She'd lost count. "You need to get over this grumpy streak, you know. Cat or no cat, they will demote you if you don't figure out how to work with—"  


"I'm fine working with Brigatti."  


That was a little too out of the blue to be a coincidence. She tried to hide a grin. "I was going to say Winslow, but since you mentioned it, Toni has noticed that you tend to leave the room any time she comes around lately. She keeps asking me about it. Are you especially worried about what she thinks about your cat? Because if you are, we should explore that."  


"Let's not, Dr. Clark. Besides, they're not going to demote me."  


"Crumb's threatened to send you to work on the next bus crash."  


"And I'll do it, too."  


Gary stood up abruptly; Marissa jumped. Even Reilly's tags jingled. How had Crumb, of all people, managed to sneak up on her? And how much had he heard?  


"But first I got an assignment for you, Hobson. Small plane, a Cantor 150, dropped off radar about an hour ago, up in the Allegheny National Forest. Senator Karnes is on board, and they're worried about weather moving in even if they figure out where the plane is. I need you to head that way and meet the search and rescue team at the airport in Bradford."  


"Since when do we do search and rescue? Don't the state police have a chopper?"  


"They're already looking, but that doesn't mean we can't help 'em out, and get whatever info we can from the crash site before it's covered in snow. Karnes is on the Senate Committee for Commerce, Science, and Transportation, so we've got extra pressure from our friends at FAA to figure this out. What are you waiting for?" he asked when Gary didn't move. "Me to send you to Atlanta to wait for a crosstown bus to stall out on some train tracks?"  


"No, it's just—why me?"  


"Why me, he asks," Crumb said to Marissa.  


She rolled her eyes. "Why me, indeed."  


"What?"  


"You get feelings, right?" Crumb asked with a snort. "Use 'em to locate that plane. I got a Bridger Clipper fueled up and waiting at Dulles. Brigatti's coming from the training center, so she'll meet you there."  


Oh, boy. Gary was going to love this.  


"Why can't I take Marissa?" he asked. Right on cue.  


"I don't think she's certified to fly the Clipper yet. Brigatti is. No offense," he added with a nudge of Marissa's shoulder.  


"None taken," she said tightly. Unlike some of the unit heads with whom she'd worked, Crumb didn't go out of his way to point out what she couldn't do. It didn't mean she liked being reminded of it.  


"I'm certified on the Bridger," Gary pointed out.  


"I'm sure you'll be a great co-pilot." Crumb drawled. "Personally, I wouldn't try to take the controls from her if you don't want a butt chewing, but that's up to you."  


"I'm not gonna do that. I trust her. It's just, who's the IIC?"  


"There's not even an investigation to be in charge of yet." Crumb's exasperation took on an edge that meant he'd run out of patience for Gary's protests. "Get your gear and head up there. I'll radio you the hierarchy if we need it. Go."  


Gary blew out a breath. "Okay, yeah. Thanks, Marissa. For, uh, the talk."  


"Sure. Hey, if you get busy up in Pennsylvania for a few days, do you want me to stop by your place and feed your cat?"  


"I don't have—" He broke off with annoyed huff. "Whatever makes you happy, I guess," he muttered as he stomped off.  


Crumb lingered at her desk for a moment, bending down to give Reilly a scratch the way he always did. "You know I didn't mean anything. About you not being able to fly a plane."  


"No, I get it. Doesn't mean I won't be able to one of these days," she added to throw him off kilter. She stood and picked up Reilly's harness. "Miguel's working on an interface that'll let me do it. Speaking of which, we're going to listen to the voice recording from the cargo plane crash in Geneva. I need to get down there."

"Yeah. Hey—" Crumb called after her. "Since when does Hobson have a cat?"

* * *

Toni had been surprised to get a call from Crumb to go look for a small plane lost in the Allegheny mountains, until she found out who was on board. Now, headed northwest with the controls under her fingers, the Clipper obeying her commands to lift its load, not free of gravity's reach but in balance with it, she was savoring this short window of time when her focus was on flying the NTSB's plane, when all the trouble she was headed into was pushed out of focus and far enough below that she could enjoy doing the thing that had brought her into this line of work in the first place.  


She _would_ have been savoring it, that was, except for the sour expression on her co-pilot's face as he glowered out the windshield. He'd seemed fine when he met her at the hanger and they'd talked through the assignment and pre-flight checklist, but he hadn't spoken a word since.  


She'd sent Marissa a text right after Crumb's call. _How can this possibly work? He's been avoiding me for weeks._ Maybe this would force her friend's hand and she'd give Toni some kind of clue what was going on with the guy. Instead, Marissa had responded, _This is your chance to figure out why. Use it ._ So she wasn't going to spill—she was too loyal to Hobson for that—but she did seem to think Toni ought to know what was going on. She was an investigator, after all. She just didn't know where to begin.  


"You doing okay there, Hobson?" she finally asked.  


"Fine."  


Stupid question, stupid answer. "It's just that I thought we—well, we didn't get off to a great start, but we got past that first rough patch and I thought we were becoming friends." She glanced over at him, but he stared straight ahead, jaw clenched. "Now I'm not sure you want to be in the same building as me, let alone the same plane."  


"I'm fine being in this plane with you." He broke his death stare out the window and turned to her, but his glance flicked to the back of the plane, as if he could find an explanation back there in their gear. "I just—there's a lot going on in my life right now."  


"That's not what Marissa says."  


"You talked to Marissa? About me?"  


"I asked Marissa about you walking out of the break room every time I walk in, yeah," she said with barely feigned patience. Did he think she hadn't noticed?  


"What'd she say?"  


"That you're fine. That it's just coincidence." She paused, checking to make sure she was following the flight path Miguel had laid out for them. "Look, I know she's your friend. Your very good friend. I get that it comes with certain expectations. But expecting her to lie for you, that's you not being a good friend to her."  


He actually gulped. She heard the weird underwater sound he made and saw his Adam's apple jolt up and down his throat. "I'm not asking her to lie for me." He said it between his teeth, and his mouth turned down, whether with guilt or with annoyance, she couldn't tell. She didn't know him well enough yet, and maybe she didn't have any business trying to know him better. But damn it, she liked the guy. Or at least, she found him intriguing. He was good looking, in a weather-worn way, and the times he'd let down his walls around her, he'd seemed to have a sense of humor that was dry, but not unkind. He was good at the job, and hadn't seemed, at least until recently, to resent her being just as good, if not better. And there was that damn electric fizzle that happened when they touched. Or almost touched. "I wouldn't do that to Marissa."  


"Because you're her friend."  


"Yeah."  


Given his stubborn obliviousness to the obvious, she had to wonder why Marissa was _his_ friend. "Any reason we can't be friends, too? I mean, I'm still the new guy here, and the people I trust enough to be on my team, I can count on one hand. I want you on my team, Hobson, but not if you don't trust me enough to tell me the truth."  


That got him to look right at her, eyes wide and tinged with green. "I do trust you. I mean, I want to, but—I also don't want you to think I'm crazy. And if I tell you what's been going on, I guarantee you will."  


Seemed like he was waiting for her to deny it. To swear she wouldn't think that. Not just waiting; he was begging her with those puppy dog eyes. "How can I tell you I won't think you're crazy until I know what you're going to say?" she finally asked.  


His shoulders dropped a little and he looked away. "At least you're honest."  


"Of course I am. Look, Hobson—"  


"Bridger 227, this is Diaz."  


Hobson flicked on the mic. "Go ahead, Miguel."  


"Hey, we got word that the Pennsylvania State Police located the senator's plane. Looks like all four people on board survived. They're on their way to pick them up with the chopper before the weather hits, but they won't have much time to get us footage of the site. Thought you might want to come in low over it on your way to the airport, see what you can photograph." He gave them the coordinates, and Toni adjusted the flight path. "Be careful, though. The pilot's saying fog came up out of nowhere, and he had faulty altitude readings. Clipped the side of a mountain."  


Hobson waited for her nod before he said, "We can make it work. Should be there in less than an hour. Can you check with meteorology up there for us?"

"Marissa's on it."  


"She is?"  


"Yeah, she's down here fussing about you two like a mother hen."  


"I am not!" Marissa didn't sound terribly annoyed with Miguel's teasing. "It actually looks like the storm will be in earlier than they planned, though, which means the winds will pick up and clear out the fog. But then you'll have to deal with the wind. North-northeast, they're saying it'll get up to thirty miles an hour after nightfall."  


"We plan to be on the ground long before that," Toni told them. "We'll be in touch as soon as we reach the site."  


"Sounds like this is fairly straightforward," she said after Hobson signed off with Diaz. "You brought a camera, right?"  


"Yeah, it's, uh…it's back in my bag."  


Why the hell would he sound nervous about that? "You maybe want to get it out?"  


She swore he swallowed back a sigh before he unbuckled his seat belt and crawled over the passenger seats to the cargo hold. It took him longer than she expected to get the camera out of his go bag, and his fumbling around in the back was accompanied by sharp exclamation that almost sounded like cursing, something Hobson didn't do as often as the rest of the crew, including herself.  


"Everything okay back there?"  


"Uh, yeah, it's—it's fine." He lumbered up to the front again, camera in hand and forehead furrowed just as they hit a thin veil of fog over the foothills of the Alleghenies. "Everything's just great. You okay to fly in this?"  


"I spent five years in the Pacific Northwest, where we have actual mountains, and not the hills you guys have around here. I've flown through fog a time or two. Might make it hard to get any good photos, though. But we'll give it a shot." She paused for a beat. "Get it? Shot. Photos. It's a joke, Hobson."  


He let out the weirdest laugh she'd ever heard. "Hahaha. Good one." He spent the next few minutes fiddling with the camera's setting, in between glances from the radio to the back of the plane.  


Toni was about to ask him what was going on, not that she would have gotten an answer, when she felt a weirdly familiar tickle in the back of her throat, so high it was almost in her nose. It was familiar because she'd felt it every time she'd visited her uncle's farm when she was a kid; it was weird because this was an NTSB plane. There shouldn't be farm animals in here.

"How far out are we?" she asked as she fought back a sneeze. Thank God she had her allergy medicine in her bag.  


"'Bout forty-five minutes."  


"Okay, take the controls. I need to get something out of my bag."  


Instead of reaching for the controls, though, he stared at her, a hint of horror in his expression. "What?"  


"I'm having an allergic reaction to something." She blinked against the building itchiness in her eyes. "I keep pseudoephedrine in my bag."  


"I'll get it."  


Before she could protest, he'd thrown himself back into the hold. Weird. "What's the matter, Hobson, don't you want to take the wheel?"  


"No, it's just, you're doing such a good job of it and—hey, cut that out!"  


"Cut what out?"  


"Nothing, I—the bags slid—just—hold on, I got it." After a bunch of shuffling and zipping, he came back to his seat again, and wouldn't meet her eyes as he handed her the box of drugs and a bottle of water.  


"At least take the controls while I take this," she said. It would take ten minutes or so for the medicine to have any effect.  


"I can do that." He blinked hard at her as if he was hearing an entirely different conversation in his head. "I'm perfectly good at flying, even in the fog, even if I never spent any time in the northwest. Otherwise, I would have met you before you came here, right?"  


"Right." What did that have to do with anything? Fighting back another sneeze, she unbuckled herself and climbed to the back seat. "I just need to close my eyes and let this take effect. Five minutes, okay? Once the meds kick in I'll be fine."  


"Okay. Okay, that's good, yeah." He turned his gaze out the window, his knuckles white on the controls. Toni needed to figure him out, but first she needed to close her eyes and let the tears wash out whatever was irritating them. Except she couldn't, because behind her, in the cargo hold, something was moving. She got on her knees to look over the seat and saw Hobson's black duffle roll itself, contrary to every law of physics, into a ball and scoot up toward her seat.  


"You ever seen the Alleghenies before?" Hobson asked. He sounded a little desperate. "They're old mountains, very old, nothing like the Rockies, but they can be dangerous in their own way. Lots of rocks. Lots of trees. A few tiny towns with nothing in betw—"  


She interrupted him with a full-body sneeze that propelled her backward, away from whatever was back in the hold. Whatever was alive and rolling around back in the hold.  


"Geez, Brigatti, are you okay?"  


"Hobson," she growled, hating how the effect was muffled by her stuffed-up nose and clogged throat, "what's in your bag?"  


"Nothing! Underwear and a toothbrush, same as you. Not that I looked at your underwear."  


"What is _moving around_ in your bag?"  


His jaw tightened, and he looked straight out the window. "I didn't bring it. I came straight from headquarters. That bag's been in my car since the last time we were on site. I mean, I washed the underwear, but—"  


"Hobson!" She sneezed again. It was almost as humiliating as it was infuriating. In the moment after, as she caught her breath, they both started at the soft sound from the hold. "Was that a—"  


"No, no, no, please."  


"That was a meow." She tore her eyes away from Hobson just long enough to see a blur of orangeish-tannish fur duck under the row of seats behind them. "You brought your cat on an assignment? You stuck it in an enclosed space with me, when I can't even breathe around the damn things?"  


"It's not my cat! I didn't bring it! I didn't even know you're allergic!"  


After another sneeze and a frantic rub at her eyes, she swung herself toward the hold.  


"What are you doing?"  


"Getting rid of the cat."  


"You can't do that!"  


"Why not? You said it's not your cat."  


"But it keeps showing up, and when it shows up—" He glanced at the console, then back at her. "Can you handle the plane while I take care of it?"  


Toni supposed it would be better than handling the cat herself. "What are you going to do?" she asked as she took the pilot's seat and the controls again. Their arms brushed as he headed back and for once she didn't feel any electricity at the contact. The fact that she noticed, that she was expecting it, was almost as irritating as the cat dander.

I'll put it back in my go bag, will that make you happy?"  


"No." But it might help her breathe again. She wasn't really going to throw a cat, dubious status or not, out of a plane. And the pseudoephedrine was starting to kick in; she could feel the effect of it calming the itching sensations in her throat and eyes. She strapped herself in. "Just keep it away from me until we land."

"What happens then?"

"Doesn't matter, as long as you keep the damn thing away from me. Send it back UPS for all I care."

* * *

Marissa gave up on listening to the survivor interviews with Winslow after less than thirty minutes. It was too hard to focus on what they were saying, and what they weren't, and to teach Winslow what to listen for, when a tickle at the back of her brain kept sending up storm warnings. She knew better than to ignore that instinct, even if she didn't have a cat to blame it on. Promising to give him more time tomorrow, she left Winslow with the interviews and headed back down to the tech lab and communications center in the basement.

"I haven't heard anything lately. They should be almost there," Miguel said when she found him. "Let's check in." After rolling a chair over so she could sit next to him at the radio console, he raised Toni on the radio. She said they were maybe twenty minutes from the crash site by air, hitting occasional patches of fog but otherwise making good time. "You probably won't get out to the site once you land," Miguel told her. "You don't have more than a couple hours of light left, and they've upgraded the winter advisory to a blizzard warning. It should hit sometime after nine. So the pictures may be the only evidence we can get for the investigation, but play it safe."

"Yeah."

"Toni, are you okay?" Marissa asked. Her 'fog' had sounded like 'fob,' and there was an exasperated, clipped tone to her responses. "You sound sick or something."

"Allergic reaction." Her voice crackled through static. "Due to an unexpected cat."

"Say again?" Miguel asked.

Marissa's breath caught in her throat. "Did you say a cat? Gary's cat?"

"I didn't bring it!" Gary's voice was muffled, but warning bells were clamoring in her head. "And it's not my cat!"

"Could we concentrate on the investigation?" Toni asked. "Diaz, you hear anything about the cause of the crash?"

"We think the pilot misread the altimeter," Miguel started. "He'd only been certified on the Cantor 150 since September. He pulled up at the last minute, but they scraped the side of a mountain and lost part of a wing. He barely got them down on an old logging road."

"They survived, right?" Marissa asked. Something in her voice must have alerted Reilly, whose tail thwapped against her leg, part comfort, part question.

"Some injuries. Not sure what condition everyone's in. They're all in the hospital," Miguel said. "You want to talk to them tonight?"

"Yes." That was part of her job, after all. But another part of it was taking care of her team, and right now she was more worried about her friends in the plane that hadn't crashed than the people in the one that had. "Gary, how exactly did your cat end up on the plane?" And what in the world did it mean? 

Toni answered instead. "He claims he has no idea. That it somehow snuck into his duffle bag with his underwear."

Like it needed to tell Gary something, she thought. Like a warning.

"I'll patch you through to Bradford when you're close enough," Miguel said after a beat. "They have like one controller with radar from 1995, but they should be able to get you over the site." 

"No," Marissa said. "No, I don't like this."

"Don't like what?" Toni and Miguel said at the same time, but the urgency of what the cat might mean took over. 

"Gary!" she snapped. "If your cat somehow got on that plane, I think you should land as soon as possible. Or turn around and come back. If the cat's there, you need to pay attention." There was a silent, tense moment before she added, "After all, you know Toni's allergic."

"As a matter of fact, I didn't know that until ten minutes ago. But I do now."

A note of bafflement was added to Toni's voice. "It'll be fine. My meds are already—oh, shit."

"What is it?"

"We're fine, we'll be fine, but we've run into a wall of fog. I'll get back to you when we reach the site, if we can see. Hobson, stay back there and keep the cat away from me!"

The radio went silent. Marissa sat for a moment, or an hour, before she asked Miguel, "What just happened?"

"I don't know. They're still heading in the right direction, according to the GPS. They're okay. It's just fog, like Toni said."

"I don't like this," she said again.

"Me neither," said a gruff voice behind Marissa. Crumb. "What's all this I heard about a cat?"

* * *

The fog had been manageable before, but in the middle of the confusing conversation with Miguel and Marissa, it thickened out of nowhere. It was sheer adrenaline, more than the medicine she'd taken, that overcame the allergy symptoms and let her focus. She was flying over unfamiliar hills—not mountains, hills, she reminded herself—relying on instruments to keep them on the right path and out of trouble. All around them, the blanket of fog was thick and white, but not quite solid. The wind picked up from the west, sending it billowing like dry ice out of a Halloween cauldron.

"Hobson, can you get Bradford on the radio?" They could talk her in. They had to be used to this. 

"Yeah, I'll—" He was coming over the back seat, head first, when a loud crack and a jolt sent them swerving to the right. The controls jumped under her hands as she fought for level. Hobson didn't even bother getting back to his seat, just reached for the radio, sprawled over the back seat with his feet still in the hold. 

"Bradford, this is NTSB, uh, Bridger 227, we're at, uh—" 

The whole plane was shaking. Toni could tell they were pitching downward, but couldn't pull up. 

"Mayday, we're—mayday!"

The wind had more control over the plane than she did, but it swirled some of the fog out of the way, long enough for her to spot a flattened hilltop, a plateau, coming up fast. "I'm putting us down!" she shouted over Hobson's calls and the windshear. "Brace!"

* * *

Later, Toni would learn from Marissa that traumatic events often affected memory, stretching or compressing them so that any real sense of time was lost. It must have been compressed for her, because looking back, she was sure everything had happened at once: the fog swirling up and obscuring their surroundings; the plane hitting something (an outcropping of trees taking out a landing gear, the investigation would decide); Hobson shouting into the radio, then into her ear as he tried to reach the controls; the cat yowling behind her like a mountain lion; a string of sneezes that shook her body; the fog clearing just enough for her to spot a bare stretch of ground; the plane's belly making contact with the ground and skidding for what seemed like a heartbeat and a lifetime (a few hundred feet, she'd learn later; about the length of a football field) and then downhill until it stopped with a shattering, crunching lurch. And then nothing.

Silence and dark. Blessed, blessed silence. No instruments, no radio, no yelling, no scrapes, no crunch, no—

\--no Hobson. She couldn't even hear him breathing, but for a minute, one silent moment, she let her head rest on the side window and kept her eyes closed. Whatever she'd done, wherever they'd landed, for that brief moment, nothing at all happened.

Then came the meow.

She let out a yelp as she opened her eyes and saw an orange tabby cat staring right at her, perched on the back of the co-pilot's seat. Or what was left of it. The entire front console was a tangle of plastic bits, wires, and other pieces of what had been the Clipper's brains, and the plane was canted at an angle that would have landed Hobson right on top of her, had he been in his seat. Toni reached back to shove the cat out of her face and unbuckle her harness, eliciting a yowl from the cat and a flash of pain through her left shoulder.

Ignoring it, she pushed herself out of the seat and peered into the back of the fuselage. Hobson, as seemingly contrary to the laws of physics as his cat, lay curled in a heap in the cargo hold. "Hobson?" she asked as she crawled back toward him, trying to ignore the way the plane rocked when she moved. "Hobson, you okay? Hey, get away from him," she told the cat, shooing it with her hand and reminding herself not to touch her face until she'd washed off the dander, then wondering why that bit of everyday wisdom was what her brain chose to cough up in the middle of a much more frightening situation. "Hobson!"

He let out a groan that set her heart beating again; like her, he didn't open his eyes at first. "What happened?"

"We went down." She wasn't ready to use the word crash, not yet. "Are you okay? You with me?" Without thinking, she reached out to touch his face. His eyes shot open and he sat up, sending the plane wobbling a few degrees right and left. She pulled her hand back, and felt her eyes go as wide as his as he stared at her.

"Toni? What happened, you okay?"

"I'll be fine." Being called by her first name made her feel just as off balance as the rocking plane. "But we should get out of here, make sure there's no fuel leak." She turned to unlatch the door on the right side, wincing at the pain in her shoulder. 

"I got it, here." He reached past her with his impossibly long arms and got the door open. She climbed out onto the wing and he slipped past her, lowering himself down to the ground. It was further than it should have been, with that side of the plane tipped up. When he turned and held out a hand, she rolled her eyes but took it and let him guide her jump down.

He looked from the crumpled nose of the Clipper to her. "What is it?" he asked when she reached up to massage the ache out of her shoulder. 

"I got banged into the side of the plane. It's fine." She stepped back, shivering in a gust of wind that was doing a decent job of clearing away the fog. Too bad it hadn't done the job earlier.

The plateau she'd spotted from the air loomed above them; from what she could tell, she'd put the plane down on it, but there hadn't been enough room to stop, and they'd gone over the edge, skidding down the slope into the tree line and stopping when the nose of the plane met an outcropping of granite. Shaggy pine trees had caught the wing struts and kept the plane from slamming belly first into the ground and rolling the rest of the way down the mountain. The left side of the plane had scraped the ground, and the skids that had held the wing level were bent almost beyond recognition, but the right side was held up by the trees.

" _Damn_ it." What had she done? She pulled out her phone to call for help, but it couldn't find a signal. "Double damn."

"Brigatti." Hobson walked a half circle around the exposed perimeter of the plane, ducking under the wing and climbing onto the boulders that had stopped their skid down the mountain to peer into the cockpit. "This is—um."

"A clusterfuck?" she provided. "A perfect example of ineptitude and failure to overcome the limits of the instruments and weather that we should have known would--"

"I was going to say it's a miracle." He clambered back to the ground and leaned against the plane, one hand on the wing. "I mean, we survived." Whipping his head around, he scanned the clearing. "Where'd the cat go?"

"I don't know. What does it matter?"

"It matters, because it—" He tipped his head back, resting it against the plane and squeezing his eyes shut. "Because we survived. We survived a—a plane crash. Right?"

She wasn't so sure about him. Shivering in her NTSB-issued windbreaker, she went over and put a hand on his arm. The little daylight that was left was fading, and they were going to lose it soon. "Look at me. Seriously, Hobson. Open your eyes, I need to check your pupils." 

He sighed and obeyed, submitting to her examination. His pupils seemed a little bigger than usual, but she wasn't sure what his usual was. It wasn't as if he'd let her look him in the eye a lot lately. "Did you hit your head when we landed?"

"Landed. That's a good word for it."

"Hobson—"

"I don't know. One minute I was trying to raise the airport on the radio and the next I woke up and you were pulling me out of the back. But I think I'm okay. I'm moving, aren't I?"

"Not at the moment." She reached out to—she wasn't sure what. Search his head for bumps or cuts. But he pushed off the plane and walked a few yards down the hill. 

"Where the hell are we?"

"The Alleghenies, somewhere. Probably in the national forest."

"But—the coordinates. I thought—I mean, Miguel said—" He winced. "What did Miguel say?"

There were a thousand things she should be doing right at the moment. Checking to see if the radio was salvageable, or if she could get a phone signal, or if there was any road off this mountain that would get them back to civilization before dark and the blizzard Miguel—and the wind singing through the pines around them—warned about. Instead, she found a clear spot, another rock with a fairly flat top poking out of the ground, and dragged Hobson over to it. "Sit down. I need to check if there's anything on your head."

"Hair, I hope." 

"Are you always this difficult to help?"

"Pretty much."

"Except when Marissa writes your reports, right?"

"She doesn't write my reports! Sometimes she helps."

"Then you can let me help you now. Come on, let me look at your head."

"You can see my head already." He blinked and swayed.

"Not the top of it. Sit."

"Yes, ma'am."

What a dope. She stood over him, parting sections of his hair as her hands made her way over his skull. There was bump about the size of a ping-pong ball behind his right ear. "You must have hit your head. Concussion protocol—"

"I'm fine, Brigatti." He shrugged off her hand and stood. "Let's just get out of here."

"Hobson, you're hurt."

"S'are you. What do you know about first aid, anyway?"

"You need more than first aid."

"Is that your professional opinion?"

That made her wince, though it hadn't seemed particularly pointed. Her professional opinion was that they'd crashed—not landed, but crashed—on the side of a mountain that was definitely not a hill. That, and his concussion, were her fault. 

"Brigatti?" He turned back when she didn't return the barb. 

"We can't leave," she said. "Stay with the plane, that's SOP. You know it as well as I do."

"There's SOP for when an NTSB plane goes down?"

She sighed. "Maybe at national you guys don't deal with small plane crashes as much as we did at the regional office in Seattle, but yeah, you stay with the plane. They can find us with GPS and get us out of here. Unless you see a road, we're better off staying put."

"It's getting dark."

"Then let's build a fire. You know how to do that?"

"Of course I do. I was an Eagle Scout."

"Okay, buddy. Get started on that."

"I don't have any matches."

"We have an emergency kit, right? There should be something in there."

"Right. In the plane. With my, uh—" She could have sworn he was about to say, "Cat," but instead he shook his head, grimaced, and corrected to, "winter gear. You brought a coat and boots, right?"

"Yeah." They'd been expecting to trek up to the crash site of Senator Karne's plane, so she'd brought a standard winter kit: parka, hat, boots, insulated gloves.

"Okay, let's set up and see what we can do to keep warm." He looked around the patch they'd cleared again, and she wasn't sure it was her he was asking when he said, "If you're sure we shouldn't just head out?"

"I'm sure. They'll find us, Hobson. We made the call to Bradford, and they can track our GPS. Trust me. And if you can't trust me, trust your team."

"They're your team, too," he pointed out.

She nodded, but only to get him to climb into the plane and get their gear. After the team found out what had happened, she wasn't so sure they'd want her anymore.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

Marissa hadn't moved from her seat since Toni had ended the radio call an hour and a half ago. Gary hadn't brought his cat on that plane; that would have been the last thing he'd do. So it meant something. It had been a warning. She'd deflected Crumb's question about the cat by saying it was just Gary joking around, but she doubted she'd convinced him, and Miguel had heard the whole thing. Neither one of them had pushed the issue, though, so she'd kept her fretting to herself. She'd promised Gary, after all. Miguel had wandered away to work on the black box from Europa 679, and Crumb had gone back to his office, checking in with them shortly after they'd expected Toni and Gary to reach Bradford. "They're running late," he'd said at the worried tone in her voice. "It happens. Let me know when they check in."

"What time is it?" Marissa asked. Again. 

"Five fifty-one." Miguel didn't point out that she'd been asking the same question every five minutes for the past twenty or so.

"They should have reached Bradford, even if they did fly over the crash site. They should have checked in."

"Maybe the radio died or something."

"They both have cell phones." And neither one had answered her texts or picked up her call. She reached for her phone again as the door to the comm center opened. "I'm calling Bradford."

"I already did," Crumb said. He sat down in the chair next to hers with a sigh that started her heart pounding.

"And?" Miguel prompted.

"They called the airport on their radio," Crumb said heavily. "Not so long after they talked to us." His hand landed on Marissa's arm, and she couldn't tell if he was bracing her or himself for what he said next. "The only word Bradford made out was, 'Mayday.'"

* * *

It took them working together to get a fire started. They gathered kindling and branches, the litter left by their slide down the hill, and cleared a spot next to the flat boulder where she'd examined his head. Which he kept insisting was fine.

"So you didn't see any kind of road as we went down?" Toni asked as the kindling caught flame from the petroleum jelly coated cotton ball and flint from the Clipper's survival kit. She cupped her hands around the tiny fire and tried to block the worst of the wind with her body. 

Hobson squinted off into the distance, as if he could see through the oncoming dark. "I don't remember. I don't think so," he added quickly when she shot him a concerned look. "I mean, it was mostly trees and hills, wasn't it?"

"You were supposed to be the spotter." She'd been focused on bringing the plane down safely, and even with all her concentration she hadn't managed it.

"I was trying to keep the cat away from you, like you said."

So that was her fault, too. Along with the fact he hadn't been strapped in. Which made it her responsibility to be sure he'd be okay. Crumb would never forgive her if she'd caused brain damage to his golden boy, and Marissa—well, Marissa probably would forgive her, but she'd be heartbroken all the same. 

The flames started licking the bigger branches surrounding the kindling, and she sat back. It was nearly full dark now, and the only way a search plane would see them was if they caught sight of their fire. She said as much, and Hobson shook his head. "Two crashes in the same day? They won't send anyone up until it's light. Too much risk to the searchers."

He was right, of course. They'd have to survive the night, and whatever weather was headed their way, here on the mountain. She nodded toward the survival kit, a handful of necessities in a plastic box with a handle. "So we have a few more cotton balls, a flashlight and batteries, a knife, a mylar blanket, water and purification tablets, a couple MREs, flares, first aid stuff, our winter gear. What else?"

"I had some sunflower seeds in my pack. You?"

"Ibuprofen and a couple protein bars."

"Okay, so we have some food, which we should probably hold off on for right now?" 

She nodded. "We have our phones, too, but I haven't been able to get a signal. I turned mine off to save the battery. You?"

Hobson patted at his jeans and produced his phone from his back pocket. "Screen's cracked," he muttered as he entered the code. "Still works, but—no, no signal. Would it be better if we go up or down the mountain? Sorry, the hill."

"I'm not sure. Shut it down, save the battery if you can."

"Can't they track us with the GPS?"

"To our last known location, which is right here. Same as the Clipper's GPS. Which is why we stay with it as long as we think there's a chance they're coming for us." She was a little worried that he'd asked the question. "How's your head?"

"Honestly?" He leaned back, his back against the boulder. "I have a headache, but I don't feel like I'm concussed. There was this one time back in middle school I slid into the goal post in a football game and bonked my head. _That_ was a concussion. Held onto the ball, though. To this day, I don't remember scoring the winning touchdown."

"My condolences," she said drily. He may not have felt concussed, but that didn't mean he wasn't. She'd have to keep monitoring him for symptoms, but what the hell was she supposed to do if things got out of control?

"I know they can locate us with the GPS, but it would be good to talk to them," he said after a while. "Once it gets light, I'll see what we can scrape together from what's left of the radio." 

"There isn't much," Toni said regretfully. "Too bad Miguel's not here. He could probably cobble together some kind of signal-sender or repair the radio."

"I wouldn't wish this on anyone," Hobson said fervently. "I never have." He didn't seem to notice how that hit her like an arrow. They investigated crashes in order to stop them, and here they were stranded because she'd caused one. 

But after the initial sting, she considered what he'd said earlier, and wondered if he meant something else. According to Marissa he'd gone into this line of work because he'd lost his sister in a plane crash when he was a kid. Maybe he was thinking about that, and not her failure.

"Better drink some water," he said, so guilelessly that she decided it hadn't been an accusation. "We don't have to worry about running out. If they were right about the storm, we're going to have plenty of snow to melt by morning."

She took the bottle he held out and sipped, thinking about the one thing that he hadn't mentioned in his inventory. "You worried about your cat?" They hadn't seen it since they'd first gotten off the plane.

"It's not my cat." He sighed and took the water bottle from her, swallowing a good swig before he added, "I have no idea how it got on the plane. I swear."

"Why did it spook Marissa so much to know it was with us?"

"She's worried about your allergies," he said. 

"Right." Toni snorted. "She wanted us to turn around, or head straight to the airport without checking the site. It's like she thought the cat was a warning of what was going to happen, but that's not possible." She looked sidelong at him, trying to gauge his reaction in the gathering shadows. "Is it?"

He just shrugged. "If you say so."

She waited for what seemed like forever, listening to the snap of the burning pine. The fire was keeping the wind at bay, and maybe its warmth made her brave, because she said, "If you won't talk about your cat, tell me about your sister."

He started, watched her narrowly for a minute or two, then said, "Marissa again? Do you two ever talk about anything other than me?"

"We talk about a lot of things, actually," she said cheerfully. Having another woman on her team had been one of the bright spots of her transfer to DC. There had been women at the regional office in Seattle, but they were so few and far between that they rarely ended up on the same investigations. "It started out being all about you, but then we figured out how much we have in common, like our shared passion for lawn darts." She waited for his surprised huff of a laugh before she said, "Of course we talk about other things, Hobson. I heard about your sister from Winslow."

"What the hell did he tell you?"

Toni rolled her eyes. "Are you seriously that gullible?" 

"Nnn…o?"

But he was, or at least, he was easy to keep off balance when it came to his vulnerable spots. She liked that about him. "Of course I heard about her from Marissa. And Crumb, and Armstrong. It comes up more often than you probably know. Seems like it's part of your origin story, but all I've heard about is the flight. North American 404, right?" When he fixed his gaze on the fire, she scooted back, a little closer to him, and added, "Come on, Hobson. I'm pretty sure Crumb sent us out together to get us talking."

"Why do we have talk about me?"

"Because if I do all the talking, you'll fall asleep, and that's not good for your concussion. Cassie was your older sister, right?" If she kept her questions matter-of-fact, she suspected he'd be more likely to respond than if she tried to tiptoe around it. 

"Yeah, she was six years older. I was kind of an afterthought." The way he said it made her wonder what things were like between him and his parents. It also made her think about what a cute kid he must have been, with those eyes and lashes.

"You were twelve when it happened?"

"Yeah," it was more of a sigh than a word.

"Look, Hobson, I'm sorry. If you don't want to talk about it—"

"I do. I mean, it's okay, as long as we stick with the facts." He rubbed behind his ear, where the bump was. "But I'd rather not talk about how I felt about it. Or what my parents must be feeling right now."

She sat up a little straighter, as much as she could manage in the bulky parka. "Oh, God, I'm really sorry, I didn't think. They must be losing their minds."

He barked out a short, sharp laugh. "More like they're loading up the guilt launcher with 'I Told You So' grenades. It's fine," he added when he saw her stricken look. "Marissa's probably called them already, told them the cavalry is coming." He cast a glance at the sky, which was a flat, starless black. Toni wondered if they were both adding the same "if": If anyone out there believed they'd survived impact. But they had to; that survivors were worth finding was the primary assumption of every NTSB agent and every first responder she knew.

"They don't understand why I do this," Hobson went on. "Why I need to know what happened to her plane. To all the planes."

"But you do need that."

"I do. I just—one day she was on her way to college, and the next she was gone. Wasn't coming home. And not a damned soul could tell us why."

Toni nodded. "It's terrible when there are no answers." 

"It looks like mechanical failure, maybe something got in the engine, but they never found enough of the engine to figure it out, and the pilots' backgrounds are murky, it might have been fatigue, but no one will admit it. There's a whole Reddit forum devoted to conspiracy theories about Global making secret deals with the CIA to cover up evidence of an alien attack."

"I can read the files just as well as you." She had read them, along with enough of the Reddit forum to know just how unhinged the posters were, but she didn't know if she should tell him that right now. "Tell me about Cassie."

He pulled his coat around him, as if the fire was making him colder instead of warming him up. "She was a theater major," he finally said. "My dad hated that. But she'd already gotten bit parts in some of the movies and TV shows they shot in Chicago. My mom's kept every one of them on VHS tapes. She still plays them. They fought a lot, but nothing earth-shattering, you know? Not like Mom makes it out to be. It's not how I remember it. How I remember her."

This was getting a little close to feeling territory. Toni refrained from pointing that out, letting Hobson take it as far as he wanted to. "How do you remember her?"

"She was great," he said emphatically. "Even though she was so much older, she was good to me. She didn't kick me off to the side. She made me be in plays she put on in our backyard. When she was in high school, she was in _The Music Man_. She had the lead, so she talked me into trying out for her little brother. I was petrified, but Cassie was there, right next to me, feeding me my lines. She—" He broke off and stared into the fire, dropping whatever he had been about to say for: "A couple years later, she was gone." 

Toni nodded, accepting that he'd given her as much as he could. "She sounds like a good person." 

His jaw tightened. "She was. She could have done anything she wanted to. But maybe I think that because she was my big sister, you know?"

"Sort of. I have two older brothers. One younger." That was something she had in common with Marissa; they were both middle kids. "They aren't perfect, but we stay in touch." She fell silent, wondering if anyone had contacted her family; if her mom was lighting candles at St. Lucy's; if her grandfather was on his knees with a rosary. 

"They'll find us," Hobson said, as if he'd read her mind.

"Yeah." It was what they did. She tried to massage the ache out of her shoulder, but couldn't quite reach. "We just need to stay with the plane. Follow procedure."

Hobson scooted closer to her and put his hands on her shoulders. "This okay?"

"Please."

He dug the heels of his hands into her shoulder. Even through the parka, she could feel the warm, assured touch that seemed so different from his usual hesitant demeanor. "Tell me if it hurts."

"No," she gasped. "I mean, yeah, but it's helping. Don't stop."

"Not until you tell me to. They'll find us," he repeated, so softly she wasn't sure which one of them it was for.

* * *

Marissa twisted back and forth in one of the chairs in Miguel's lair. She didn't know what she was waiting for. What any of them were waiting for.

The search and rescue team at Bradford had gone up shortly after they'd heard the mayday call, which was impressive given that a small team had only just transported the survivors of the Cantor crash, including one prominent politician and his wife, to the hospital. But the last known location of Gary and Toni's plane, according to GPS, was a remote mountain somewhere in the middle of a national forest that didn't have an official hiking trail, let alone a road. They'd tried to get a helicopter up, but the winds got too strong and darkness had fallen.

"If they made it through the crash," a Pennsylvania State Trooper named Doug Fields told the team in DC, "they'll have to get through the night on their own." Marissa hadn't heard any undue emphasis on that "if," and she'd been listening for it.

A physical search might have been impossible, but the NTSB team in DC hadn't let that stop them, at least not right away. Paul and Winslow had joined Miguel, Crumb, and Marissa in the comm center, and they'd tried radio calls every fifteen minutes at first, eventually tapering off to once an hour. Marissa sent text messages and voice mails to both phones every hour on the hour.

"We need to alert their families," Crumb said when the team first assembled in the comm center. 

Marissa didn't volunteer at first, even though contact with families was part of her role. She hoped that maybe someone on the team would realize her close relationship with Gary, at least, would make it difficult for her to walk the line between NTSB agent and friend of the family. But no one else made the offer, not even Crumb. Inwardly cursing them all for cowards, she went to make the calls. 

She spoke to Bernie Hobson and Elena Brigatti. Both seemed either stoic or in shock at first, asking for information and not blaming her for what she couldn't tell them. Both of them spoke as if they were convinced their children were alive, and while Marissa couldn't officially say she agreed with them, she tried to leave them with hope. It was the only way any of them would make it through the night. She promised to pray and to stay in touch, the only promises she was allowed and willing to make, and somehow convinced Bernie not to get in his truck and drive into the teeth of a blizzard to get from Indiana to Pennsylvania. 

"How'd it go?" Winslow asked when she returned to the comm center. 

"Fine," she snapped, then reminded herself that a call from Winslow to the Brigattis or the Hobsons would have probably been a disaster. It was just as well he'd chickened out, but she wasn't in a mood to go over it beat by beat, the way he always wanted to. She'd give him one and only one bit to chew on. "They invited me for dinner when this is all over."

"The Hobsons?"

"And the Brigattis."

"Oh, man, can you imagine?" Winslow sounded like he was drooling. "Homemade Italian food..."

"They invited Marissa, not you," Paul pointed out from his spot next to the computers Miguel had set up to receive meteorology and Doppler data. Soft beeps punctuated his words. "And it's her dad who's Italian. Her mom's family is Mexican. Thanks for doing that, Marissa. I know it can't be easy."

"It never is," she said.

"But if you get dinner invitations in the process, that's a bonus, right?" Winslow was obviously trying to make up for his faux pas with a pep talk, but it grated on her nerves.

Miguel must have sensed as much. "Heck, my mom would invite you all for dinner if you called to tell them I blew a tire on the beltway and was gonna be half an hour late."

"Mine wouldn't," Crumb said, "but that's because they're dead." It was a weak attempt at gallows humor, but it was enough to get Winslow off the topic. "Okay, you guys—and gal—let's figure out our strategy here."

* * *

"What about you?"

Toni jumped out of her doze; Hobson had half-shouted his question over the droning wind. She wasn't sure how long she'd been out of it, but the fire was dying down and he didn't seem to have made any move to build it up again. He was behind her, one hand still lightly working the ache in her shoulder, while she leaned—not against him, exactly. That wasn't possible with all the layers of sweaters and coats between them. But their outermost layers were touching, and she wasn't sure what to make of that. 

"What about me what?" Even to her own ears, she sounded weary and irritated.

"I dunno. Anything." His voice was muffled, by the dark or the wind or their separate cocoons of parkas and hats. "You want kids? Ever been married? Or gotten close? Have any relatives die in plane crashes? Got a magic cat?"

"Hmm." She tilted her head, as if considering, trying to hide her concern that they had talked about at least some of these things earlier. "Maybe, no. Once, no and fuck no."

He snorted. "Okay. So, why'd you get into this job? And why do you keep doing it?"

"The usual reasons, I guess. Not that you'd know anything about 'usual.'" She waited, but he didn't react to that. "It was the planes. I wanted to be around them," she finally said. "They always looked so free up there, and I know how naïve that sounds. They're made up of gears and grease, not feathers."

"And tiny parts that break and bring them down."

"Yeah. But they look like birds." Until they didn't, she thought with a shudder for the wreckage just behind them. "That feeling, when the physics take over and lift you into the air, it's addicting." But she hadn't always known that, not until she took her first flying lesson when she was twenty-two. "For a while, I wanted to go into law enforcement. FBI or something."

"You'd be good at that."

"Maybe. I took a handful of criminal justice courses in college. Went on a few ride-alongs with my brother Gabe. He's a cop in Portland. But I switched my major to forensic science and did a master's in aviation. It was more interesting." 

"The work finds us," he said, so quietly that the wind seemed to carry it away.

"Or we find it." Since it was True Confessions Around the Fire Time, and she'd started it, Toni added, "To be honest, I didn't like what I saw of day-to-day police work, and getting to detective would have taken years." Not to mention breaking several glass ceilings. "This was a way to combine the two, and avoid contact with the worst humanity has to offer. Most of the time." Another gust of wind, and the accompanying moans of the pine trees, cut her off for a moment. She shifted, trying to banish the cold seeping up through her jeans now that the fire was dying down. "I guess I thought it would be easier, being a woman in a career like this, where it's supposed to be about evidence and science."

"The NTSB's still an old boys' network, though, isn't it?" he asked. "Maybe not as bad here as in Seattle, but we have our share of flyboys. Crumb tends to weed those out as much as he can."

"I'm not the only one who's been talking to Marissa."

"She said—" He cleared his throat. "It sucks that you couldn't get ahead out there."

"If I had, I wouldn't have gotten in your way." She wouldn't have dropped him down on the mountain in the middle of a blizzard, either.

"You're not in my way, Brigatti."

"Kinda seems like you think so. Like you've thought so ever since I showed up and got made IIC for that case in Rockford instead of you."

"We ended up solving that one together. And most of the other ones since." He took his hand off her shoulder, but he didn't move away from her. "Sorry I was such a jerk then." 

She'd suspected his resentment more than once, but he'd worked to hide it from her. Whether that was Marissa's influence, or Crumb's, or just his own moral center, she'd felt it, and appreciated it. Still didn't mean he trusted her, if he wouldn't tell her what was up with his cat. "You weren't a jerk then, and you aren't now." 

"Thanks."

"For what? For telling the truth? I—" Another gust—no, a gale—swept down the mountain, bending some of the trees and smothering what was left of their fire, scattering coals to the pine-needles covering the ground. It didn't let up, and when Toni stood and turned her face to it, icy crystals stung her cheeks and her eyes. Hello, blizzard.

"We can't stay out in this," Hobson yelled into her ear.

"But the fire—"

"We won't be able to keep it going, even if we can restart it." 

She glanced around, but there wasn't much to see as the snow descended. There was only one place they could shelter, and they both knew it. "It isn't safe," she shouted, remembering how unsteady it had felt trying to move around the plane.

"It's out of the wind." He put a hand on the small of her back and pushed her toward the Clipper while he stooped to pick up their gear. "C'mon, Brigatti, it's all we have."

* * *

Sometime after the dinner hour, which everyone, even Winslow, ignored for once, Trooper Fields called to let them know the storm had hit. "They aren't quite calling it a blizzard, not yet, but the snow's started and the winds are over forty miles per hour. Can't see anything but snow, not even the planes on the runway here. We shut down the airport because it's too dangerous to even drive over to HQ. But it looks like there's going to be a window tomorrow morning."

"A window?" Marissa asked.

"Yeah, the storm has a tail, and it's supposed to be just as bad as round one here once it whips around. We'll have a couple hours in the morning to find their plane and try to reach them if there are any signs of life, as long as the winds cooperate. Then we'll get another foot or two of snow, depending on which mountain we're talking about. Hang in there. Nothing we can do tonight, but we'll be ready to head out as soon as things clear up in the morning."

After that call, people drifted back to their own desks and offices to do what they could: run specs on the Bridger Clipper, look at old reports and statistics to see if there was any helpful information about survival rates and successful rescues, and, in Crumb's case, harangue the higher-ups who'd insisted he send his team after the senator. 

"Can they do anything to help?" Marissa had asked.

"Dunno, but it'll help me to make 'em squirm," Crumb had said darkly.

The whole team was waiting, each in their own way. Somehow, Marissa thought, Toni and Gary must know. They had to believe that they were doing everything possible, which included waiting, to justify that faith. 

If they didn't believe, if they weren't—

But they _were_ alive. They were waiting to be found. If Gary's cat had been on the plane, it had been there to warn them, and that couldn't have been in vain. So she tried another voice message to Gary's phone, listening to his entire outgoing message just to hear his voice. "It's me," she said after the beep. "Again. You know the drill. Contact us as soon as you can. We're not giving up."

Not long after, but long enough that Marissa was considering leaving another voice mail for Toni just to hear her voice, too, the door to the comm center opened. "Hey, Crumb," Miguel said from his station at the radio. "How goes the haranguing?"

"Not nearly satisfying enough," Crumb said with a snort. "Half the guys who spent all morning calling me about Karnes have shut down their offices. We're supposed to get an inch or so of snow off that same system that's hitting the Alleghenies. Hey pup," he added to Reilly, who'd stood at attention when the door opened. 

Crumb stopped behind Marissa's chair and put a hand on its back. "I'll never understand how half an inch of snow can shut down a city, let alone the nation's capital. Back in Chicago, we'd get twenty times that and everything would stay open, right, Marissa?" 

She nodded. It was a source of pride for both of them that they knew how to navigate winter better than most of the federal government. Tonight, though, she didn't find any comfort in it, not when her experience gave her a pretty good idea what Gary and Toni were dealing with, even if they'd survived uninjured.

"Yeah, I wouldn't know. We didn't get many blizzards in Puerto Rico," Miguel said. "Hurricanes, sure. We'd get worse winds, a lot worse, but the precip that came with them wasn't frozen."

"Must be nice," Marissa said absently, fingering her phone. 

"Nice," Miguel deadpanned. "Sure, if you don't mind losing your roof every couple years."

She opened her mouth to apologize, but Crumb gave her chair a half turn, pointing her toward the door. "Okay, I've seen enough. You're exhausted. You should go home for a couple hours. Get some rest. Stop leaving voice mails, you're gonna crash their phones or something."

"Technically, you can't do that," Miguel started, but Crumb made an impatient noise that stopped his explanation.

"You know I'm right," he told Marissa. "Nothing more's gonna happen tonight."

He was right about her being exhausted, and not at her sharpest, but that was the only thing he was right about. "A lot _will_ happen overnight," she pointed out. "We won't know about it, but it will happen. And we'll never know if we give up."

"I'm not saying give up. I'm saying go get some rest so you have the energy to work on this tomorrow."

She shook her head and crossed her arms, like a five-year-old. "I'm staying."

"At least take your dog upstairs and feed him. You've been down here for hours. Get some fresh air, or at least some less-stale air."

He was pushing this, which was odd. He usually knew when to back off, with her if not with government hierarchy. "Are you trying to get rid of me so you can say something to Miguel?"

"I'm not that stupid, sweetheart."

Miguel snorted, then covered it with, "I promise I'll tell you if he does."

She sighed, picked up the harness, and stood. If nothing else, the dog would appreciate a change of scene. Who knew, maybe moving would jar something loose in the universe. "Okay. C'mon, Reilly. But if anything happens—"

"You'll be the first to know," Miguel promised.

Together with Reilly, she navigated her way through the computers and lab tables to the elevator, then up to the floor with their offices and cubbies. She stopped by Gary's desk long enough to run her finger through the layer of dust that he never took the time to wipe off. Of course he wasn't there, but it made her feel like they were a little closer. Further down the corridor, she paused at Toni's cubby, but judging by the squeak of the chair Toni was always complaining about, someone else was already there.

"Marissa, hey," a deep voice said. "Any word yet?"

"Paul?" She was surprised he was still around, especially with the snow coming. "Don't you have a baby to get home to?" 

"I called Meredith, told her what's up. She's the one who told me I'd better stay. I think she's a little sweet on Hobson, if you ask me."

"He has that effect on some people." Since Gary's divorce, Meredith had made a point of inviting the whole NTSB team for dinner every few months. She'd said it was their responsibility, as the only currently married couple in the group, to "properly socialize the singles," and she cooked enough—or, more often, had caterers bring enough—that they all went home with generous boxes of leftovers. Despite being a new parent and an overworked patent attorney with a partner whose job was equally demanding, Meredith always had time to gather people around her and make their lives feel like they were about something other than the job. Something more…humane. It didn't surprise Marissa at all that Meredith would understand the need for the team to stick together tonight, or as together as they could be with two members missing.

She placed a hand on the edge of Toni's desk. No dust here. Marissa always supposed Toni kept it strictly organized, but she'd never asked. "Is there anything here that might help?"

"Uh, no. No, I was trying to figure out—I don't know what."

"I understand." For the first time since that afternoon, she fought back a smile. Sitting in the cockpit, trying to imagine an accident in progress to find the clues that would crack the case, that was Gary's gig, and Paul had made fun of him for it more than once. But here he was doing the same thing. "Toni's a good pilot, you know. She wouldn't—" No, she couldn't promise that. "She did everything she could to bring them down safely," she said instead. "I'm sure of it."

"Me, too. I mean, I've only worked one case with her, but she's—hell, she doesn't deserve this. Or any blame that's coming down on her." 

"It's not," Marissa insisted, though she knew just as well as Paul that the NTSB attributed something like eighty percent of small plane crashes to pilot error. It was a running source of irritation, if not outright conflict, between the agency and the aviation community. But there was no way she was going to let any report target this particular pilot, no matter what had happened. "It was fog. And as Crumb likes to say, we're not in the blame business."

"It's not Hobson's fault, either," Paul said with a note of fierceness that surprised her.

"Of course not."

"Even if he has been acting squirrely lately." He waited just the right fraction of a second to catch her off guard before he added, "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you? Anything that would help us find them?" 

Marissa hesitated. She knew perfectly well that Gary was right to want his suspicions about the cat kept secret. There would be so much disbelief, especially from Paul and Crumb, that it would take weeks or even months before they could accept it and let him do the job of an investigator in this new, unorthodox way. Until they did, how many cases would go unsolved? How many lives might be lost?

But Paul was right, too. They were all on the same team, and as a team they were—or could be—stronger than Gary was giving them credit for. She couldn't damage that team, or her place on it, by lying to them outright. "I do," she finally said, "but right now, it isn't my place to talk about it."

His voice tightened. "Not even if it saves their lives?"

She felt her back stiffen, and Reilly tensed on his harness when she said, "If I thought it could save them, I would broadcast it on CNN."

"Right. Sorry. I just—"

"I know. Look, I'm heading to the break room to feed my dog. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

"Sure." He stood and let her lead the way. "I have my tablet here. I'll pull up the maps and maybe we can figure out the best way to reach them if the helicopters can't."

"So you're staying, too?"

"Meredith's orders. Besides, that's what a team does, right? We're here for each other."

Wishing they could have had this conversation in front of Crumb, Marissa nodded. "We are."

* * *

Despite Toni's protests, Hobson insisted on lifting her onto the wing of the plane, grabbing her around the waist and hoisting her up as if she were a toddler.

"I could have climbed up on my own," she snapped as she took the bags he held up and tossed them inside.

"You would have pulled the whole plane over on yourself."

"I'm not that heavy, Hobson, God."

"That's not what I meant!" She turned in the doorway to see him wave his arms toward the Clipper. "It's just not all that steady."

"What do you think'll happen when you lumber up here, you overprotective idiot?"

"I don't lumber." He put one foot on the wing strut and hauled himself onto the wing, making the plane wobble. 

Toni backed into the fuselage, then held out a hand to pull him inside. "You'd better not."

"What's that supposed to mean?" 

She didn't even know anymore. Throwing his words back at him was an automatic response. A defense. She wasn't even sure what it was a defense against, until he shone his flashlight back into the cargo hold and swung it past her perch on the half-collapsed left passenger's seat and into the wreckage of the cockpit. Then she realized it was a defense against his crazy.

"I don't think your cat is here." 

"Why not?"

"For one thing, I'd be sneezing my head off." She should have been anyway. Cat dander tended to linger, and at the rate they'd been crawling around the same plane the cat had invaded, they were both probably covered in cat hair. Maybe it was the cold keeping her allergies at bay, though at least in the enclosed fuselage the wind wasn't as bad. It leaked in through the cracks in the plexiglass windows and windshield, but she had a plan for that.

"You got any plastic bags or t-shirts?" They raided their go bags for flexible items to stuff into the cracks. The spiderweb crack on the windshield got covered with duct tape from the survival kit. 

When they finished, the temperature was a little more comfortable, though she wouldn't have called it warm. Hobson shut off his flashlight, but it wasn't completely dark. The weird, almost pinkish light of a snowstorm cast the interior in a gloom that turned their shapes, and those of what was left of the plane, into dark grey blobs. "Wonder where it went."

"Your cat?"

"No, my pet platypus. Yeah, my cat."

"Why aren't you wondering how it got on the plane in the first place, since you claim you didn't bring it?"

"I didn't!"

She bit back a tirade about his negligence, and how her reaction to the cat might have caused the crash. Because it was a crash, and cat or not cat, she shouldn't have let it happen. "It probably ran off somewhere."

"Great. That's just great." He buried his head in his hands and let out a moan. 

"Why do you care?" She couldn't quite keep a laugh of disbelief out of her voice. "You keep saying it's not your cat."

"It's not, it's just—" He sucked in air through his teeth. "You don't happen to have any aspirin in your bag, do you?"

"There's some in the first aid kit." She decided to ignore her suspicion that he was using a possible concussion to deflect from her questions about the cat. No matter what was up with the cat, the concussion was real, and it was entirely possible she didn't want to know anyway. 

The wind picked up even more, howling through the trees and rocking the plane. Toni couldn't tell if what was hitting the exterior, making sharp pings that sounded like bursts from thousands of tiny machine guns, was ice or snow. Despite her cramped crouch on half a seat, she was glad not to be out in that. The fire would never have survived. 

"Cat'll be okay," Hobson muttered after he swallowed the aspirin with the last bit of water in the bottle. 

"Sure." She tried to shift herself so she could stretch out her legs, but there wasn't room. Maybe if she went the other way, or crawled into the hold.

She was half over the seat when Hobson caught hold of her ankle and pulled her back. "Brigatti, c'mon, you don't have to do that." 

"There's not enough room here for both of us, and I am not sitting on your lap."

"I'm not saying—geez." He scooted toward the edge of his seat, turned so his back was against the door and indicated the sliver of space between his legs and the seat backs. "If we go sideways, we can both stretch our legs." When she hesitated, paralyzed by the mental picture of herself snuggling with—no, not with—next to Hobson, he added, "It's going to get cold in here tonight. If you freeze in that crouch, your knees will never unbend. Trust me."

"And you know this because?"

"Because I've been on ice fishing trips with my dad since I was six. Lotsa walleye," he added inexplicably, with a slight slur that made her grab the flashlight from him and shine it in his eyes. "Hey! What's that for?"

"Checking your pupils for concussion." Just like she'd done three or four times already. "Don't you remember?"

"I don't remember you getting this close. That light's gonna make my pupils smaller anyway. Like, you know, fish eyes." He wedged himself even further toward the cockpit, and she slid into the space he'd indicated. "Good. That's good."

"It is?" She wasn't convinced either one of them would be any less stiff by morning. 

"Yup. This way we've got, you know, body heat. Gonna cut off circulation to my arm if I don't—here." He shifted again and put his arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer. 

"Great," she groused, though he was right. It had been inevitable since the moment they'd landed. 

Since the moment they'd crashed. 

"I promise I'll be a perfect gentleman." Was his voice a little slurry? 

"Mmm-hmm." She had to admit, being able to stretch out her legs didn't suck. Neither did warming up, whether it was 'just body heat'—or _his_ body heat, and her accompanying fear that she was blushing from her toes to her roots. She fished the foil blanket out of the emergency pack and pulled it over them both. His feet stuck out the end, but he had boots, he'd live.

She tried, once more, to get some kind of signal on her cell. Sent a text to Crumb that hung forever, until she saw her battery was down to six percent. "Shit. Must be the cold." She prayed it would hold on long enough for the alarm she set to wake her in a couple hours. 

"Why do you need to wake up at one in the morning?" Hobson asked. 

"Concussion protocol."

"You don't need to worry about me."

"Yes, I do."

"Why?"

"You know why."

He sighed. "Wish I did, so we could end this conversation."

Probably she was supposed to keep him awake all night long. Probably they would both freeze to death if she didn't. But, trapped inside a plane with a man she was equal parts attracted to and concerned for, sheltered from a storm inside a plane that she'd brought down and he'd turned into a cocoon, she was just too tired to fight the urge to close her eyes. Just for a moment, just long enough to hide from the knowledge of what she'd done and the realization that he'd maneuvered them both so that her shoulder was against the seatback. When she turned onto her side—toward Hobson—she could lift it so that there was no weight or pressure on it. But that could have been coincidence.

It probably was coincidence.

She shifted and felt him turn on his side too, so he was sheltering her from the slivers of wind that snuck in through the patched windows. Despite her exhaustion, her mind kept turning in circles, wondering what she could have done differently, and how she'd report this if it was someone else's crash. If only she hadn't been consumed with sneezing, if only she'd thought to take the allergy meds before she even got on the plane, if only she'd had more flight time recently, if only she'd been able to slow the plane sooner and keep them up on the plateau, where they would have been easier to find, if only she hadn't taken the assignment instead of jumping on the chance to take the Clipper up without asking who was coming along, if only she'd stayed in Seattle in the first place. 

"Say it," she finally said.

"What?" He sounded like he'd been drifting off. But she couldn't rest at all until she got it out in the open.

"Just _say_ it, Hobson."

Inside the plane, his voice lost the edge it had when they'd been fighting with the wind. "Maybe it's the bump to my brain, but I don't know what you're talking about."

She sucked in a breath. The need to push past whatever politeness was keeping him from lowering accusations at her so they could have this fight had built up inside her like the need to sneeze. "That bump to your brain, our likely freezing to death, your cat being lost, all of it, is my fault." She spoke into his chest rather than his shadowed face. "I crashed our plane. We had an assignment, and it's my fault we won't be able to complete it, and if one or both of us dies out here, that's my fault, too. It's going to go down on record as my fault, and I'll probably lose this job because I couldn't get us through the fog, something I've done dozens of times before." 

There was a long pause. Braced for him to either agree or argue, unsure which would be worse, she could feel the hitch in his breathing before he said, "That's not the way I see it. It sure as hell isn't what any report I write will say."

"No?" It came out a whisper, almost lost against the rattle of icy snow against the skin of the Clipper. 

"The way I—Toni, look at me, would you?"

When she finally lifted her head, just enough to meet the barely visible glint of his eyes, he had the audacity to grin. She closed her eyes and her head dropped. Not because he was mocking her—he wasn't. There was understanding there, and she wasn't ready to accept it. 

He reached out and touched her chin with two fingers. Not forcing her to look at him, but definitely encouraging. She broke out in goose bumps. Thank God he couldn't see it. 

"The plane went down because of the fog. And maybe because of your reaction to my cat, but that's not your fault. You landed it in spite of that, nearly in one piece."

She snorted. "That was sheer dumb luck."

His fingers rested lightly on her cheek. "That was you saving our lives."

"Hobson." Her voice cracked. She reached up and touched his glove with her own. "What are you doing?" Touching her, forgiving her.

His voice was as hoarse as hers. "I'm saying thank you."

"Why?" she croaked, and another gale rocked the plane. 

That had to be why their lips made contact. Good old fashioned physics shook her toward him, pushed her a couple centimeters closer, and their lips touched. Moved. Did what lips are made for, tentatively at first, and then, after he pulled back enough to whisper her name, he kissed her again. Or maybe she kissed him. It didn't matter because she needed it, in that moment, more than forgiveness, more than air. His lips were chapped, but so were hers, and both were more questions than answers. 

Finally they both broke for a breath, but he cupped the back of her head with his gloved hand, bent so their foreheads touched. 

This would mess everything up, from this moment on. She braced—again--for him to say so, but he grinned—again--so big she could see his teeth gleam in the snowy light, and said instead, "You gonna put that in your report, or should I?"

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

Once Marissa fed Reilly from the stash she kept in a break room cabinet, she sat down with Paul to learn about the last known location of the Clipper 227. They both ignored their coffee as Paul pulled up maps on his tablet, describing the area to her in so much detail she could almost hear the wind soughing through the pines. 

"It's severely isolated, if the GPS coordinates are correct," he said. "The kind of place people go when they want to get away from any human sounds and light pollution. Bradford is the closest town, and they're at least forty miles out. Who knows how much farther they'd have to go if they're on top of a mountain. They couldn't have walked too much of anywhere before the weather hit."

"What about rangers?" Marissa asked. Someone, somewhere, had to be able to reach Toni and Gary. "Are there any stationed in the park?"

"Yeah, but the park's a big place, and there's no trail up to this spot. If there's any sign of life tomorrow, they'll have to try to get to them on snowmobiles."

"Didn't they get the Cantor survivors out by helicopter?"

"That was before the wind kicked up. I don't know if the window tomorrow—"

"There you are!" Miguel's voice accompanied the opening of the sliding door to the break room. "Doesn't anyone up here work at their desks?"

"It's after hours," Paul pointed out. 

"Yeah, so what are you two doing here?"

"You know exactly why we're here," Marissa said.

"Yeah, yeah, of course, just kidding." He sounded as excited as a little kid, and he didn't sit down. Reilly even stopped eating as Miguel's energy reverberated around the break room.

Marissa clenched her fists, bracing against too much hope. "Do you have news?" 

"No, but I have an idea. I've been thinking about what Officer Bob—"

"Trooper Fields," Marissa corrected. 

"Right. What he said about tomorrow's window. I know how we can get to them. I have to clear it with Crumb first, but since I found you first, how do you feel about a road trip?"

* * *

It didn't go any further than a kiss. Or a handful of them. How could it, with both of them wrapped up in winter gear, wearing gloves, the only exposed skin their faces? But then again, kissing Hobson, just like everything about him, was unlike kissing anyone else. Instead of keying Toni up, it calmed her down and chased out the brain weasels. After a few minutes, they settled back, more comfortably than before.

Toni was staring at the ceiling of the plane, wondering when everything would stop spinning, when he whispered, "Like I said. It's not my cat."

"What?" She craned her neck, but his face was turned away from her now, toward the ruined cockpit. 

"'s not me either. But if it's not here, we're okay, right?"

Oh, God. Had the kiss just been part of his head trauma? Or had she taken advantage of it?

But while any other time she would have lain awake worrying about what it all meant, here it seemed right to leave it unclear and undecided. Whatever it had been, it was real, and it would be in the morning. She could figure it out then. "We're okay," she whispered back, and let herself drift off.

* * *

Miguel's plan involved using his enhanced drone, the Ojo de Dios, to get close to the Clipper's last known location and find the wreckage.

"And the survivors," Marissa added. The team had congregated in the comm center again, where the energy had ratcheted up a few notches at the idea that they could use their skills to actively work with search and rescue. To do something more for once than wait.

"Right. We'll have to get close, closer than the airport to launch it. The range is about fifteen miles, battery life is—"

"Diaz!" Crumb broke in. "Can you find them or not?"

"I can. But I need some help. We need someone who knows the terrain and can keep me from crashing her into the side of the mountain."

"And we'll need to convince the search and rescue team we aren't stepping on their toes," Crumb said. "Get some actual interagency cooperation going on."

"They're going to help us," Marissa said fiercely.

"Say it like that, and you'll convince them," Paul said. 

"The thing is, though, we have to get going now," Miguel went on. "We can't fly into the storm. We have to drive, and we have to leave now if we're going to be there by the time the weather breaks. Crumb, you keep talking about being from Chicago. Can you get us there?"

"Let me get this straight." Crumb's voice rumbled through the comm center, the rest of the team's silence broken only by soft beeping from the computers. "I've got two of my people lost, God knows where, in the middle of a blizzard. And you want me to take the rest of my team, along with your Fancy Nancy flying robot, and drive into that blizzard in the middle of the night?"

"Yes," Miguel said. Marissa held her breath.

"Guess we'd better get going. Which one of you jokers has a van?"

* * *

In the end, the whole team went--except for Winslow. There wasn't room for all of them and Miguel's drone in Paul's minivan, even after he removed the baby seat.

"Why me, though? If Marissa goes, there won't be room for the dog," Winslow whined.

"Reilly can sit in my lap," she said. Which wasn't exactly what happened, but Reilly was happier curled up at her feet than Winslow would have been. Crumb put him in charge of coordinating communications between their team, the FAA, and NTSB headquarters, which seemed to mollify him.

What should have been a six hour drive took nearly ten; the roads were clear when they started but got worse the farther north they went. The winds were so strong that snow drifted over the roads as soon as highway crews got them cleared, and there was a layer of ice underneath that sent them fishtailing more than once. Crumb got behind plows as often as he could, but there were times, especially on the more isolated highways through the Alleghenies, that Marissa could feel the tire beneath her feet alternately slipping on and crunching through the snow. 

Crumb's complaints about the road conditions, and occasional litanies of cursing, were colorful reminders of just how bad things were outside the van. She tried to sleep, knowing she'd be more good to the team if she was rested, but when she leaned her head against the window, the cold seeped through her skull and she woke from a light doze shivering.

She was pretty sure Paul and Miguel didn't sleep much, either. There was a tension in their silence, as if they were all wishing the storm out of their path. It was as if the three of them were trying to help Crumb drive by keeping vigil. 

Somewhere in southern Pennsylvania, they stopped for gas and coffee. The station attendant, a woman with a kind but weary voice, told them they ought to spend the rest of the night in the truckers' motel across the street. "The storm is loads worse up in the mountains, and they're saying we'll get another foot of snow tomorrow afternoon," she said. "What's up there in the middle of nowhere that can't wait a couple days?"

"Our friends," Marissa said at the same time that Crumb said, "Work."

"Work friends," Crumb amended. "You got any coffee that's been sitting out for a while? The really black stuff."

She filled up his thermos with something that smelled like diesel and handed Marissa a couple of dog treats for Reilly. "You all be careful up there. I hope your friends are okay."

"They will be." Marissa pulled her scarf up over her face as they ducked out the door and into the wind. Even the short walk to the van, pelted with wind and snow, was enough to take her breath away. Toni and Gary would be okay. They had to be okay. She just wasn't sure how.

* * *

Toni woke into suffocating silence. Something was missing, but it was a struggle to pry her eyes open and figure out what. Her left side was cold, despite all the layers, but to the right there was a faint hint of warmth radiating from--

Hobson.

She rolled onto her side and watched him sleep, but only for a moment, only until everything hit her at once.

They were in a ruined Clipper in the middle of a blizzard.

But the wind wasn't howling anymore.

And she could see him; there was a faint light filtering in through the windows.

Which were covered in snow and ice.

She'd been asleep for hours without checking on Hobson.

She'd _kissed_ Hobson.

But he had a concussion, so it didn't count.

And there was a sneeze building in the back of her nose.

"Hobson?" She nudged him, shook him, squirmed until she was half-sitting, her legs entangled in his, her heart pounding as she realized one more thing: she'd fallen asleep curled against him, lulled by the even rhythm of his breathing, and now she wasn't sure he was breathing at all. It wasn't just that the wind had ended; so had the soft sound of their joined breath. "Hobson! Gary, wake up, c'mon." Could she do CPR, wedged in like this? He wasn't dead, he couldn't be, he was still warm. Please, she added silently, please, don't, please—

_Meow._

The cat leapt from the cargo hold, landed on his chest, and swiped a paw at his face. 

"Hey!" Hobson sat up abruptly, grabbing the cat by its neck and pulling its face close to his. "What are you doing here?"

Toni leaned as far back as she could. She couldn't speak. It took her own breath away, the shock and relief and gratitude. Shock that she might have lost Hobson; relief that he was awake; gratitude for the weird cat that must have been sleeping behind the seat all night without setting her off the way it had when they'd been up in the air. It had brought Hobson back to life as far as she was concerned, even though the idea was patently ridiculous.

"What's he doing—why do you—oh, _shit,_ " Hobson finished as the cat crawled onto his shoulder and pawed at the door. Hobson's eyes met Toni's—she was practically straddling him now--and he blinked a couple times, as if registering everything at once, the way she had. His equation must have had a couple extra factors in it, because he looked over his shoulder at the cat, back at her, and then, without a second of hesitation, he elbowed the door open. She heard it the scrape as he forced it through the snow piled up on the wing, felt the plane shudder at the movement. Before she could ask why or what, he'd somehow lifted her over his head and through the door into a world that had turned white. "Jump, Brigatti. Get off the plane now!"

While she crouched, frozen in bafflement, on the wing, he tossed the cat and their bags out after her and crawled out headfirst. "Brigatti, get down!"

"But—"

" _Please._ " 

Why did she obey? There was something in his eyes that convinced her, something in that word, the echo of her own silent prayer only moments ago, that sent her rolling off the wing and into snow so deep she thought for a second she'd never stop falling. She sat up and the bags went sailing over her head. The cat streaked past, so light on its feet that it skimmed the drifted snow. Then Hobson was next to her, his hand around her arm. He hauled her up, away, and into the trees.

"Hobson what the hell?" she said when he stopped, bent nearly double to catch his breath. 

"I don't know, I—the cat—I think—" They both turned back at a metallic groan. The trees that had been holding the less damaged side of the Clipper bowed, burdened by the weight of the plane and the snow. The struts bent and snapped, a shotgun sound that echoed off the surrounding hills. And then, all at once and in slow motion, the Clipper's wing folded under the fuselage. The plane rolled from its perch in the trees, over the spot where they'd built their fire, down the hill and then over a drop off, leaving a trail of pieces and billowing clouds of snow in its wake. 

It hadn't even settled several hundred yards below when Toni started shaking. It was cold, it was shock, it was trauma, she told herself, but knowing where it came from didn't stop it. She couldn't logic her way out of her teeth chattering and her body shuddering. "W-what just happened?" she stammered.

Hobson stared at her for a moment, shook his head, and wrapped his arms around her. She didn't fight it. She let him hold her together while she stared over his shoulder at the cat, who watched them with an unreadable glint in its expression.

* * *

They pulled into Bradford Regional Airport at 7:30, the four of them—five, counting Reilly—groaning and stretching after holding themselves in tension for far too long. The storm had eased about an hour ago. The wind wasn't howling quite as badly as the night before, and it wasn't flinging snow at them, but the temperature had dropped to a point where even a light breeze cut through coats and scarves.

They met up with the search and rescue team in a hanger where sound reverberated off metal walls and the smell of stale coffee mixed with that of engine grease and fuel. The SAR team consisted mostly of Pennsylvania State Police like Doug Fields, airport personnel and local first responders, and a handful of Air National Guardsmen, who were there because the military had been assigned to the search for Senator Karnes's plane the day before. 

"You got stuck here because of the storm?" she heard Paul ask one of them.

"Sir, we're the Guard," the woman responded. "We can get out any time we want. We stayed because we want to help."

Marissa tried to take in the names and roles of each person as they were introduced, but anxiety and the need to get to work, meant she was going to have to figure out who was who on an as-needed basis. She did like the overall vibe of the other team, based on their handshakes, offers of coffee in Styrofoam cups, and the fact that they seemed as anxious to get started on the search as she was. 

Once Crumb and the leader of the SAR team had briefed everyone on overnight developments, which consisted solely of updates on the weather, Miguel opened the van and introduced them to his drone.

"Ojo de dios." He sounded like a carnival broker. "Sees all. Finds all. ODD for short. It doesn't have the range of a military model, but it does have sensitive sound monitoring, 360 degree cameras that transmit data real time, infrared scanners to detect even small differences in body heat between species of mammals, including humans, and the ability to transmit text messages without a cell tower if it detects a cell phone or other device."

After some consultation, the team decided it would be best to take ODD closer to the last place the Clipper's GPS had registered, to take full advantage of the time they had left before the second round of the storm hit. Miguel would ride out with a few of the SAR team in heavy duty vehicles, send ODD up to locate the Clipper, and look for signs of life before they sent in a helicopter or a crew on foot. 

"Excuse me," Marissa interjected into the intense discussion about which vehicles to take and who should be on the go team, "but you're not just looking for signs of life. You're looking for Toni Brigatti and Gary Hobson." She knew she ran the risk of sounding overly emotional, but her voice was only a little shaky, and that was primarily due to the chilly hanger. It was worth any hit to her credibility to send the team out with a reminder that they were looking for human beings, and not just pings on one of ODD's sensors. 

"Damn straight we are," said Doug Fields, and she felt a tiny bit warmer. "The weather guy says we have until 11:30, noon tops, before conditions deteriorate again, so let's get moving."

* * *

At some point, Toni's shaking eased. She pulled away from Hobson. Without a word, they waded through the snow to what seemed to be the edge of the precipice, one that she hadn't really been aware of before, and peered down at what was left of the Clipper. It looked like a tech drawing that someone had crumpled into a ball and thrown away, with its colored stripes against its light grey exterior and the snow. Her heart broke for it as if it were a dead bird.

Her heart had been through a lot in the last…five minutes? Maybe ten? Hobson had gone from potentially dead to savior to comforter without any lead time, and now he was…what was he?

She glanced back at the cat, who was still watching them from its perch on the rock. She didn't feel any allergy symptoms coming on. It was probably the cold that had tamped them down. 

"I heard that, you know."

Hobson finally turned his eyes away from the crumpled wreckage of their plane, of their shelter, so far down the mountain. The thing they wouldn't survive another night without. "Heard what?"

"On the radio, Marissa said that if the cat showed up, you needed to pay attention. What did that mean?"

He gulped. "Marissa likes animals. She probably meant I needed to find it some kibble or—ow!" he yelped as Toni grabbed his arm and pulled him around to face her. 

"All right, Hobson, that's enough. I understand you don't want to talk about it because you don't want anyone to think you're weird. Or crazy. Guess what? It's too late. We just escaped being crumpled up in—in _that_." She waved an arm toward the wreckage. "And it has something to do with the cat. So level with me, because nothing else matters anymore. We already think you're weird. _I_ already think you're weird, and I kissed you anyway."

"But I'm not crazy. And the cat was—I mean, last night—" He tried backing away, but she matched him step by step without letting go of her grip on his arm. It was kind of adorable, the way he stammered like a verbal drunk trying to avoid giving her any answers. If she'd been watching him do it to someone else, she might have found it funny. But right now he was the guy whose survival she was responsible for, whose concussion she was responsible for, and the guy she was, in spite of everything, intrigued by and attracted to. If she didn't get answers, there was going to be more shaking, but this time it would be her shaking him. "I just—the cat just showed up and--last night was an accident, or boredom or something, wasn't it?"

"Is that what you thought?"

"I don't know what to think! You started it. You tell me." 

"That was _not_ something I'd do lightly. If you knew anything about me, you'd know that."

He took a deep breath, met her eyes, and finally nodded. Something in the way he looked at her was different. It made her breath catch, and not from the cold. "Okay, so last night was—that was—okay." 

"Just, 'okay'?" She tried to make it light and teasing, to hide the fact that it stung.

"No! No, I meant I agree. Like, okay, so you're saying that it—that it meant something." He waited for her nod, even though she wasn't ready to say exactly _what_ it meant, before the furrows around his face melted, transformed to tiny crinkles around his eyes. "And trust me, it was more than just okay."

Much as she might have wanted to pursue that line of discussion, there were more important things to talk about now—now, before she lost her heart completely, and now, when his guard was down. She leaned in close and went for the kill. "So what is the deal with your cat?" 

"He's not my—"

"Hobson!"

"Sorry. Back off, will you?" But he kept a hand on her arm, as if he needed her for balance. In response to the question he must have read in her eyes, he said, "I can't think straight when you're that close."

That had to be the concussion talking, she thought dizzily. "I don't understand what just happened. How you knew to get us out. And I want to. I need to. Hobson, please." _Please give me a reason to trust you. To know that whatever this is between us isn't going to stop right here, because I can't take you on if you really are as off base with reality as this seems._ "Tell me what's going on."

"Okay." That word was like a mantra with him. He looked over at the cat as if asking its permission. "The cat showed up last summer, not too long before you did. At first, it just hung around my porch, and I thought it was a stray. Marissa said I should leave food out for it. It's not like I wanted a pet, though, so I didn't." 

"Hobson." Despite her exasperation, it came out as a half-laugh, half sob. Maybe he'd think it was the cold changing her voice, she hoped as a breeze, slight but sharp, cut through her coat. "I need the abridged edition."

"Right." He shut his eyes. "The cat's been doing stuff that's led me to some of the solutions I've come up with over the past few months. Like Charleston, when I told the techs to check the pistons for cracks before we found the engine. And the Geneva thing."

"Geneva? That was an anonymous tip. That was you?"

"I'm telling you, it was the cat. He started yowling when I saw the news story on CNN, and I saw exactly what must have happened. It was just kind of laid out in my mind. I didn't know how else to report it. It sounded so impossible."

"You had a vision?" That much, she might be able to live with. She still didn't understand what the cat had to do with it.

"Sort of." He opened his eyes. "I know how it sounds. But it keeps happening when the cat's around, and it keeps showing up when it shouldn't. When he woke me up this morning—"

"I was the one trying to wake you up."

He bit his lip, with just the tip of his tongue showing. If he kept doing that his lips were going to be too chapped to kiss. "Okay, but the cat is what I saw first. As soon as I did, I knew what was going to happen. I saw it, or imagined it."

"Because of the cat?" 

"I'm not sure. At the moment, all I could think about was getting us out of the plane."

She wasn't sure he'd been thinking, exactly. It had looked a lot more like panic. "You're saying the cat tells you what happened in crashes and what's going to happen to you?"

"It can't talk. I think it's all just coincidence, except—"

"Except what?" she asked when he went into a brief staredown with nothing.

"Except Marissa says it's not. She thinks the the cat pulls stuff out of my subconscious or something." His eyes were pleading, asking her to believe. She wasn't sure what to do. But if Marissa didn't think it was a dealbreaker to their friendship, maybe she could live with it. She shivered, wishing she could talk to the more grounded half of the Hobson-Clark pair. 

And then it hit her: this was what Marissa had told her to figure out. As if this was a logical conclusion she could have drawn from everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours or so. "She thinks it's you having the visions, and you're deflecting them onto the cat?"

"Pretty much." He looked positively miserable. "It's not impossible, I guess. Still doesn't explain how the cat got on the plane."

Or how it had woken him up when she couldn't. She sighed and shivered again, casting a glance at a bank of clouds moving in from the west. The storm wasn't finished with them. They needed a way out of this mess, and he was more likely to come up with one if he stopped feeling sorry for himself. "Let's say that's true. What do we do next?" She nodded toward the cat. "He giving you any ideas?"

"It doesn't work that way. I don't have any control over it."

She couldn't keep the impatience out of her voice; she was too tired, too worried, too cold. "Look, Hobson, if you don't want to admit you're psychic, or intuitive, or just plain good at your job, that's your problem, not mine." It could easily become her problem if she let it, but she couldn't think about that right now. She had to focus, and to focus him, on their survival. "What is my problem is that we're stranded on a mountain with another blizzard coming on. I need you to use your whatever-you-want-to-call-it to get us out of here."  
She followed his gaze to the haphazard pile of their gear that he'd tossed out of the plane. The cat had finally jumped down off the rock and was pacing from that pile to the trees, back and forth, skittering over the snow like a waterbug on a summer pond. "I think it wants us to follow it. Maybe it's found a way down the mountain. One that's safer than—" He tilted his head toward the cliff their plane had fallen off. "—you know."

"So you want us to follow your cat." She didn't believe the cat was magic. That had to be the concussion talking. But she'd go along with it if it got him to move.

"I know it sounds—"

She held up a hand. "Don't say it." Trudging through the snow, she picked up what she could of their gear and motioned him to do the same. "Lead the way."

* * *

Marissa, Paul, and Crumb stayed at the airport, but they moved with a handful of the SAR team to a small conference room inside. The coffee was just as stale, but the room was a lot warmer than the hanger. Paul patched them into Miguel's group through a radio that crackled with static as various arms of the team filled each other in as they stationed themselves at the most advantageous places to launch different kinds of rescue missions. He turned the sound down, though, when the airport director offered to play a recording of the call Gary had made the day before, which had been saved to a laptop the SAR team was using.

Crumb hesitated for half a second before he said, "Yeah, go ahead." He sidled up close to Marissa as Gary's panicked voice filled the room. His shouts of, "Mayday!" made her grip Reilly's harness tight, and the retriever leaned into her, his feathery tail thumping against her legs. 

It was too short. "Want to hear it again?" the director asked. 

"No—yeah, but can you send it to my phone?" Crumb asked. "Those are our friends. We don't need it broadcast in here."

"Send it to mine, too," Marissa said. She knew Crumb was trying to protect her, and God knew what he was reading in her expression, but this was part of the job, and there might be something in the message that would give them a clue about the final moments of the flight.

Of the flight, she reminded herself. Not of anything or anyone else.

"They're okay," she said. "Toni's a good pilot. She found someplace to set them down."

"How much do they know about cold weather survival?" one of the S&R team asked. "You guys down in DC don't know how bad it gets up there."

"They know enough," Paul said tersely. "They would have stayed with the plane."

"If it didn't disintegrate," someone muttered from a corner. "I've seen pine trees rip up wings on small planes. That one we rescued people from yesterday, they wouldn't have lasted the night in what was left of the cabin."

Marissa reminded herself that this team was exhausted, dealing with their second small plane crash in a row, and feeling pressure from all sides with the lives of a US Senator and NTSB personnel on the line. Despite all that, they were committed to finding Toni and Gary. She couldn't let honesty fray her nerves. "We'll find them."

Miguel's voice sounded through the radio. "We're launching ODD now."

* * *

They followed the cat into a denser section of trees, breaking a path that Toni knew was taking them down the mountain. If the breeze that gradually picked up speed as the morning wore on and more clouds moved in was coming out of the northwest in the direction that most winter storms seemed to move, they were heading south. Or south-ish. It was hard to tell whether it was the wind changing directions, or them.

Thanks to all the pines, the snow was less drifted here. Though she was following in the path Hobson, with his longer legs, made as he followed his cat, it was real work to keep herself going forward. She was sweating inside her winter gear, but knew better than to take anything off; the wind would freeze the moisture onto her skin. A series of soft thumps accompanied their path breaking as clumps of snow fell off the trees. 

"How long have we been walking?" For once, the fact that Hobson was a throwback who wore an old-fashioned wind up watch came in handy. Her phone was tucked under her long-sleeve t-shirt, where she hoped her body heat would help it conserve what little charge it had left.

Hobson stopped in a clear space that was about the size of her apartment kitchen. He pulled back the cuff of his coat, looked at his watch, at her, up at the sky, back at his watch. Then at the cat. "When did we start?"

"You don't know?"

"Yeah. I. Uh. It was eight thirty, wasn't it? Or maybe six forty. Anyway, it's ten fifteen now. Which means we've been walking for either a day or a few minutes."

"Hobson?" She ventured a little closer. Like her, his face was mostly covered by a balaclava. What she could see of his expression was clouded and genuinely confused. "Okay, buddy, let's hear it. Name, rank, serial number."

"I'm fine." The creases around his eyes deepened when he added, "Jeremiah Fine. Sergeant Jeremiah Fine. Glad you're here with me in the Alps, Private."

"So you're fine, then. Good." What was she supposed to do with him if he wasn't? "How much longer do you think we should go? We need to find a place where we can send up those flares, if we want search and rescue to find us."

"Trust Cat." Hobson gestured at the furball in question, who placidly set off in what seemed to be the same direction they'd been moving all morning, with "seemed to be" the key phrase. Concentrating on where to put her feet so her legs didn't give out from exhaustion made it hard to keep track of the big picture. "He knows the way."

So now his cat was "he" and not "it." His mystical, magical cat who was supposedly helping them. But he'd only mentioned its mystical magical properties after he got the concussion. "You call your cat Cat?"

"Seems like as good a name as any. And he's not my cat," he added over his shoulder as he set off, but with less vehemence than ever.

"You've given him a name and shelter." Toni raised her muffled voice over the sounds of birds and their boots moving snow out of their way. "You feed him, and oh, by the way, you rely on him to help you close investigations and save our lives. The two of you are more than just passing acquaintances."

He grunted at that, but didn't argue.

Back under the trees, a falling clump hit her smack on the head, and it felt like the final insult. She stopped, suddenly sure she couldn't go another yard. Hobson went a few more yards before he realized she wasn't following. He turned around and laughed, and she couldn't exactly blame him. It didn't make her any less annoyed or exhausted.

"This is ridiculous." It wasn't a revelation or anything, but all her doubts had hit her along with the snow. "Why did we leave the site? Why the hell are we following your cat?" 

"Because he saved our lives."

"That was one thing, but this—" She cringed as the wind gusted, sending clouds scudding overhead and several clumps of snow to the ground. "—this is getting us nowhere. We need to either find a road or go back to the site so search and rescue can find us." The cat, who'd perched on top of a knee-high hill of fallen clumps, stared at her. "How do you know you're right about this?"

"I don't," he admitted. "But what else are we going to do? Look, I know this seems…impossible. But I think at this point the only way out is through." He must have read some of her weariness in her eyes, because he opened the survival kit. "But first maybe you should eat something. You want an MRE?"

She'd been trying to save their food, but at this point, she wasn't sure what she was saving it for. They needed energy if they were going to make it much further down the mountain. "Protein bar," she said instead. He handed her one, and she fumbled through the process of unwrapping it while keeping her gloves on, then broke it in half. "Take it," she urged.

He shook his head. "No, thanks." 

"Aren't you hungry?"

"Yeah, but for all I know, it's the lump on my head talking." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I have a headache again, and the further we go, the less real this all seems."

"If that's a concussion, then I have one, too." Toni thrust the half at him again. "Eat something, Hobson. That's an order."

"I don't recall Crumb putting you in charge," he groused, but he took the bar and pulled his mask down to take a bite.

"Emergency protocol says the agent without brain damage takes lead." She fished out the empty water bottle and scooped snow into it as best she could, then unzipping her coat. 

"What are you doing?"

"We need to melt this so we can add the purification tablet. The only way that's gonna happen is with body heat, unless you want to take time to build a fire."

He took the bottle out of her hand and slipped it under his own coat. "Let me. I've got more body heat to give than you do." He watched until she re-zipped her coat before he started after the cat, who'd hopped down from the little snow hill and trotted away at a quicker pace than before.

She sighed, then moved as quickly as she could to catch up with them. When they came to a fallen tree, as big around as a fuselage and too long and tangled with other growth to go around, Hobson scrambled over it, then offered his hand to guide her jump down. He kept her hand clasped in his as they set off again. It was more work to walk next to him than to follow in his steps, but Toni held on. 

He was always going to be more work. She sure as hell hoped he was worth it.

* * *

"Hey Armstrong, I'm patching you through to the camera feed." Miguel's voice sounded tinny and even farther away than he actually was through the radio. "You read?"

"Yeah, we got it," Paul said. The conference room fell silent as everyone snapped to attention and crowded around the table where he'd set up a monitor to receive ODD's camera feed. 

"ODD made it to the coordinates just a minute ago," Miguel said. 

Marissa clenched her fists in her lap. He didn't say they'd found Toni and Gary, or the plane, and wouldn't that have been the first thing he said, if they had? Time stretched like taffy as she waited for confirmation that she'd been right to believe, that they were there. That they were alive.

"She's fighting the wind," Miguel went on, "but doing better than a chopper would. Don't see the Clipper, but there's some disturbance in the snow down the hill. I set her to follow it. We're almost—" He stopped. Everyone in the room stopped. There wasn't even the sound of breathing around her. The pressure built up in her head until she wanted to scream.

And then a collective exhale, laced with curse words.

"What is it?" she asked, and was met with a torrent of answers she couldn't sort out.

"If they were in that mess--"

"Never stood a chance."

"God _damn_ it, I thought we were going two for two."

"Sorry, Crumb. Um, all of you."

"That can't be their plane," Paul said in a dazed voice.

" _Is_ that actually a plane?" someone else asked.

Finally the pressure had to be released. "Somebody _tell_ me!" Marissa insisted, and Crumb put a hand on her shoulder.

"There's a plane halfway down the mountain from the GPS coordinates. It's…it isn't in good shape. Struts are gone, the fuselage is bent in half, there's a wing folded over the cockpit. The other wing's torn. Hold on, Miguel's honing in on the tail so we can see the number." He squeezed her shoulder in a crushing grip. "It's theirs."

"They weren't in it." It came out a whisper, a promise to herself, but she knew it was true as soon as the words left her tongue. "They aren't in it now, and they weren't—they can't be."

"Marissa," Paul said gently, and the rest of the search team seemed to back off, or at least hold back the curses and comments, because everyone fell silent again as he cleared his throat. "If they were in the plane when it landed like that, and then the blizzard—I don't see how they could have survived it."

She knew that tone. She'd used it herself, over and over again, with families and friends of victims. But Gary and Toni were not victims. Not if Cat had been there. She could feel everyone waiting for her response, waiting for her to voice the fears and emotion they were all feeling. But she was as tough as any of them, and someone had to be the brains of the operation. "Okay," she finally said, biting back the certainty that they were alive because she had no way to verify it yet, "but if the drone can see all that from above, when there was—how much snow?"

"Over a foot," Miguel said. "Looks like some of the drifts are three to six feet, but it's hard to tell from above."

"Over a foot of snow last night," she echoed. " _After_ the crash. So why isn't the plane buried?" Her voice did want to shake, but with hope. "What if they did land at the GPS coordinates, instead of where the plane is now? What if they got out before it ended up like that?"

"It's a long shot," a clear voice behind her said. "Wind could have pushed the snow away."

"But it's a shot." Crumb drew in a breath. "Diaz, get in close. Let's see if there's any sign they're in there."

Marissa listened as Crumb and Paul took turns describing what they saw: no movement or sign of life around or within the plane, but it had skidded a path through the snow from higher up the mountain. A mountain whose top was a relatively flat plateau, which would have been a port in the storm if Toni had tried to put it down while Gary was making that desperate call on the radio. 

"Nothing on the infrared scanner," Miguel said. "I'm putting out a call in case they're close enough to hear."

"Even if they made it through the crash, they would have sheltered in the plane overnight. There's nowhere else for them to go up at the first site," said one of the search team. "If it fell after the storm, they were probably in it."

"They weren't," Marissa insisted. "They wouldn't stay in the plane if they knew it was going to fall down the mountain like that."

Someone snorted. 

" _How_ would they know?" Crumb asked, with a sharper edge than he'd been using with her.

"They're both smart. I know them. They were not in that plane." Gary's cat had been with them. Whether it was magic, or from God, or some extension of Gary's own instincts, it had been there, and it had protected them. To think otherwise would be unbearable.

"Then where are they now?" Paul asked. 

"They're probably trying to get to help. Didn't you say there's another storm coming in? We have to find them."

"Protocol is you stay by the plane." A note of despair crept into Paul's voice. "Especially if you're the pilot and you brought it down. They would have stayed in it, if they survived the initial crash. Which means when it fell--"

"I'm not talking about protocol. I'm talking about Gary Hobson and Toni Brigatti. It's been my job here to know people and how they behave. This team functions because we know each other. If you won't take my word on that, look at the evidence. They are still out there somewhere and we need to find them." 

"Miss," the leader of the SAR team, Sam Jenkins, started.

"It's Dr. Clark."

"Dr. Clark," he corrected. "I understand that you want to find your friends. But that mountain is in an isolated spot. There aren't any known roads leading up it, and coming down when they don't know the territory is going to be tough. If we knew where they were, if we knew for sure they were still alive, we would do our best to get to them before the storm whips around. But it's coming around fast, and I'm not going to risk my team on a maybe."

Crumb cleared his throat. "The missing people are my team, and it's my call." He waited until a rumble of "yes, sirs," sounded, then said, "The way I see it, if they're in the plane, it probably doesn't matter when we get to them. But if they aren't, we're on the clock to get to them before the storm hits. Let's see if we can find any sign of them. Get as close as you can and look for footprints."

"The wind's going to cover them up," someone pointed out. 

"Then let's get on it before that happens. You got that, Diaz?" 

"On it, boss."

"The rest of you, I want maps and surveys. Let's see if we can figure out where they might go."

"But Crumb—" Jenkins objected.

"I'm not saying send your people. Not yet. But we're not giving up on my people either." He touched Marissa's shoulder. "Dr. Clark, Armstrong, you're with me."

* * *

The protein bar gave Toni a little more energy, just in time for the snow to move in. There were only a few flakes at first, but the light dimmed to a grey so heavy she felt as though she were swimming through it. Before long the snow started coming down in earnest, determined to bury anything that had survived the night before.

She fell behind Hobson again. The wind was at their backs, but it took the thick precipitation and swirled it around them, between them, so that she had to resist the urge to hold on to the strap of his duffle bag for fear of losing sight of him. 

"Can you still see the cat?" she called over the wind. 

"What cat?"

She had to have heard him wrong. Had to. "Hobson?" No answer. He kept moving, so she did, too, because at this point there was nowhere to go but forward. She hoped their path wasn't taking them over another cliff, like the one that destroyed the Clipper.

Just as she had that thought, something landed against her chest, pushing her into a snow bank. For half a second, she thought it was another dislodged clump of snow, but it was warm. As she sat up, coughing and flailing in shock, she looked straight into the eyes of Hobson's cat. Its mewl was almost too low to hear under the wind. 

"What the hell? Hobson, get back here! Shoo, get away!" She pushed the cat off her chest and struggled to her feet. The swirling snow and fading light had already obscured Hobson, however far ahead he'd gone. They also made it impossible to tell which way was ahead. 

"Hobson!" she screamed over the wind. The cat pawed at her boot, took a few steps to the right, then repeated the action. "Where are you, damn it?" She took off running in that direction. The wind in the trees might have been loud, but it wasn't loud enough to drown her calls. Not yet, anyway.

She had no idea how far ahead she found him—tripped over him, and nearly went down again. He was on his hands and knees on the path, head down. Toni put a hand on his back, willing him to react, to get up and move, because there was no way she could carry him, wherever they were going. "Hey, Hobson? Gary? Gary, look at me."

"I tripped. There's a branch here, under the snow." He got halfway up before he let out a yelp and went down again. This time he landed on his butt and grabbed at his left knee. 

This couldn't be happening. "Gary, come on, you have to get up," Toni begged. "I know you're hurt, but we can't stay here." 

The cat nuzzled Hobson's leg. "Right," Hobson said. "Right, we have to go. We can't stay here. It's snowing."

Toni got behind him and put her hands under his arms. "You can lean on me if you need to." She got him upright and propped him against one of the trees while she strapped the packs he'd been carrying onto her own back. Pulling his arm around her shoulder, she started them forward at a halting, dangerously slow pace. "We're still following the cat, right?" 

"Right," he said through his teeth. "I think we're almost there."

"Almost _where_?" She couldn't help it; it came out on a half-sob. 

"It's okay," he assured her. "We'll be okay, Cassie. We're almost home."

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

Marissa braced herself for Crumb to chastise her for being emotional, or worse, illogical, in front of the SAR team. But instead he led her and Paul to a table in the deserted airport café. 

"They're alive," she insisted before anyone else could say differently. "We have to help them."

"For what it's worth, I think you're right. I think they're alive, and I think they got out of the plane before it ended up…how it ended up. Yeah, I know the protocol too," he said when Paul protested. "But we're not giving up on our team." He lowered his voice, leaned closer to Marissa. "The thing is, we can't go with nothing more than feelings here, you got that?"

"I'm not."

"I know they're your friends. They're mine, too." Crumb paused, then added, "Well, Brigatti anyway." Marissa wasn't sure if that was supposed to get a smile out of her; it nearly did. "The thing is, I can't let that influence my decisions. I have to weigh the risk to the search and rescue team, who are even more tired than we are, against what we can prove. Not what we believe."

"If I could go out there myself, I would."

"That's not what I'm saying." He sighed. "Look, I stand to lose two people tonight. I'm not gonna lose you, too. Not to the storm, and not to whatever the hell Hobson's deal is. You were right about them putting the plane down higher up. We're at ninety percent or so on that one. But how do you know they were out of it when it fell the rest of the way?"

When she didn't answer, weighing her promise to Gary against the likelihood that breaking it might save his life, he added, "And what the hell does all this have to do with his cat?"

"His cat?" Paul asked.

"The cat he claims he does not have," Crumb said. "The cat Brigatti said was on the plane."

Marissa swallowed hard. "I do have evidence," she finally said. They were on the same team, and they'd proven they were loyal to Gary, cat or no cat, by coming here to find him. "It may not be evidence you'll believe, but it's real. And the cat—Gary's cat—is the proof."

She explained as best she could, leaving out her theories about what it all meant, and how it might be related to Cassie. "I think the cat was there as a warning. And if it warned them about the landing, it would have warned them about what happened when the plane fell the rest of the way, too."

There was stunned silence for longer than was comfortable. 

"Marissa," Paul finally said, probably because Crumb was too flummoxed to say anything at all, "This doesn't make sense."

"If you accept that the cat is somehow helping Gary access information and his intuition, it _does_ make sense. It would explain Charleston, and Geneva, and a lot of how he's been acting lately."

"Here I thought he's been acting doofy because he's sweet on Brigatti," Crumb said.

"That may be part of it."

"If it's affecting his performance, you should have told me sooner."

"It's affecting his performance in a good way," she pointed out, pushing away a stab of guilt. If she'd gone to Crumb, maybe Gary and Toni wouldn’t have been on that plane in the first place. Maybe the assignment would have gone to someone else. 

Or maybe it was destined to happen to them. Maybe they needed it to happen to them, somehow. 

"I can't use this with SAR," Crumb said glumly. 

"But do you believe me?"

"Not sure what difference it makes at this—" He broke off at the echo of footsteps on the linoleum floor of the café.

"Your drone guy is asking for you." It was the clear-voiced tech. "He thinks he found some footprints, but they won't last long. It's starting to snow out there again."

* * *

Toni couldn't have heard him right. He hadn't said, "What cat?" before he wandered away and fell, and he hadn't called her by his dead sister's name. This couldn't be happening. None of it. Not the crash, not the kiss, not the destruction of the Clipper, not the storm, not his concussion.

Not Hobson, leaning onto her injured shoulder so much that her eyes watered. Not the wind freezing the tears on her lashes. None of it could be real. The only thing her exhausted brain and heart could accept as real was the faint orange-tan form of the cat, striding just ahead of her like it owned the mountain and somehow never quite disappearing into the blowing snow.

Every step they took together, Toni and Hobson and the cat, was a step away from all the things that she couldn't accept. So even though the wind stung through all her layers and her legs were exhausted from breaking a path through the snow while supporting Hobson and all his gear, she made herself move. One step, then another, and another. That was all there was left in the world.

The cat made a left hand turn. At first, Toni thought it was to avoid another fallen tree, but after a few more steps in that direction, she saw a shape--a rectangular shape, a human-made shape--emerge from the shifting wall of snow. 

"I told you," Hobson said in her ear. "We're home."

* * *

Miguel had found a set of tracks that disappeared into the trees. One of the SAR team, a park ranger from the national forest named Ingrid Faust, told Marissa it was tough to tell if they were human or animal, let alone how many sets of feet—or paws—had made them. A few hundred feet downhill and south from the crash site, there was too much tree cover for ODD to see where they'd gone.

"I need to bring her in," Miguel said. "She's got the juice, but the wind's tossing her all over the place."

"It's already too windy to put a chopper up," Jenkins said. "We could send snowmobilers if we knew where to send them, but we can't cover the entire mountain. Not on that evidence."

"Look, we know what crash sites look like," Crumb said. "We know what crash deaths look like, and we know that survival can look a lot of different ways. Those two are survivors, and knowing them, they probably have divine intervention on their side, too."

"They'll need it tonight," Ingrid said. "But there are ways to shelter, if they're smart. We'll just have to wait for morning to find them." 

" _If_ they're out there," said Jenkins.

Marissa didn't like where the conversation—and the team's mood—was heading. "I understand that we can't go after them right now," she said, ignoring the pang in her heart. "That doesn't mean we should give up." She turned to Ingrid. "I know you know those mountains and the people who work there. Is there anyone you know who knows it better?"

Ingrid didn't hesitate or take offence. "Joe Kingston. Retired ranger. He's in his eighties, but his mind's sharp as a tack and he has seen some shit."

"I want to find out if there's anywhere our friends might be sheltering. Can we talk to him?" 

"Possibly," Ingrid hedged.

"What's that mean?" asked Crumb, who sounded intrigued. "Doesn't he have a phone?"

"He's got a landline, but he hardly ever answers it. He's paranoid about the FBI listening in. Joe doesn't like government. Especially not federal government. I can try to get through to him, but the chances of him talking to an NTSB agent are—well, you know. Snowball. Hell."

"But you'll try?" Marissa asked.

"Got nothing better to do."

Kingston didn't answer his phone, and he didn't have a machine to take messages. Ingrid promised she'd keep trying, and Marissa excused herself to make calls to the Hobson and Brigatti families. She didn't trust anyone else to put the right spin on the day's events.

* * *

"Calling this a cabin is a stretch." Toni eased Hobson onto a narrow bench that sat in front of a hearth. `

"It's a shack. Maybe a lean-to." He made a pained sound as he stretched out his leg, then noticed she was standing over him with her hands on her hips. "What?" 

"You called me Cassie out there. You called this place home." She slid their bags off her shoulders and pulled back the hood of her balaclava so he could see her face. "You know who I am now, right?"

"Yeah. Hey, buddy." He bent over to scratch the cat, who was rubbing against his snow boots and purring. "Thanks for getting us here."

"Hobson. Gary." She didn't know which one to call him; didn't want to think too closely about how, in the midst of panic, she'd used his first name twice now. Or how that might have been what caused his addled brain to mix her up with his sister. She pulled his hood back and he blinked up at her. "I need to know you're with me. I can't do this alone."

"I was hurt," he said with a sheepish shrug. "I wasn't thinking straight. I could hardly see out there, and I turned around and you were gone."

"Because your damn cat threw itself on me."

"He did?"

"Knocked me into a snow bank. That's when we lost each other." 

"What'd you do that for?" he asked the cat. "I got turned around and my foot caught on that branch. And then I thought—I thought maybe I was dying or dead, and Cassie was there with me." 

"I'm not her, Hobson." She let the inflection land on his last name. He kept blinking up at her, like a dope. "I'm not going to let you die. I'm not some ghost, do you understand?"

He grabbed her arms—more like the sleeves of her coat—and pulled her down and kissed her, warm and electric and completely sure and safe. "I know who you are, Toni," he said, nearly sighed, when they broke apart. "And you sure as hell aren't my sister."

"Okay," she said, just as breathless. "Good." He released her arms, and she straightened up. "I'm going to check this place out, see what we can use."

Congratulating herself for resisting the temptation to start making out with him to warm them both up, Toni braved the storm long enough to check outside for any sign of where they were. There was no fence around the place, and no discernable road or path leading to it. No mailbox or outbuilding. No electricity, and the propane hookup was empty. A few rough-hewn logs set next to the front door, and there were two miniscule windows on either side of the door. The one room inside had a bench, currently occupied by Hobson, a cot shoved up against the far wall, and a counter with a kerosene stove and a kettle. The lone cabinet held a couple of mugs, a few bags of generic tea, and a can of mandarin oranges with a sell-by date that made it older than her niece who'd started kindergarten last fall. 

While she inventorying their new shelter, the cat watched her from its perch next to Hobson, who was obviously grateful to his weird companion for saving their lives twice in one day. And it wasn't that she _wasn't_ grateful, too. But now that they were inside, and the mountain and storm weren't trying to kill them, she had a lot to process, including but not limited to what the cat meant, why Hobson had imagined his sister out there when he thought he was dying, why he thought he was dying in the first place, and why she was content to let him distract her from all those huge questions with a kiss.

She brought in some of the wood and went to work starting a fire while Hobson massaged his knee. "It should be okay," he said when she shot him a questioning look. "I hurt it playing football in college and it flares up every now and then."

"Like when you slam it onto the ground?" she asked. 

"Yeah, and when I—I really thought she was out there, you know?" The swish-shish of him rubbing the ankle through his ski pants slowed to a whisper and he stared into the blooming flames.

This was when she needed Marissa to help her understand the human brain. Somehow, the cat and Hobson's sister and everything that had happened to them were all connected, at least for him, but she couldn't quite understand how it all worked. "I guess it makes sense that you're thinking about her now," she offered, wondering if he was ever not thinking about her.

"Yeah. Here, I almost forgot." He pulled the water bottle, now about a quarter full of melted snow, out from under his coat. "You want a drink?"

She had to laugh at that. "We can melt all the snow we can handle now, between the fire and the kerosene stove."

"And the blizzard. Don't forget the blizzard."

"How could I?" 

He made room for her on the bench, and she took the bottle of ibuprophen out of her bag. "Want some?"

"Agent Brigatti, are you offering me drugs? I think they call that entrapment."

"I won't tell if you don't." She downed three pills, careful to leave enough water in the bottle for him. Sure, there was plenty of snow outside to melt, but she really wasn't interested in opening the front door any time soon.

"Guess it's just us again tonight," Hobson said. He looked at his watch. "Or this afternoon. It's not even three o'clock."

"Just us." Toni glanced out the tiny windows, where snow was battering the glass. "And your cat?" It sat a respectful distance away, and for whatever reason, she didn't feel like sneezing.

"He saved our lives."

"That he did. We've survived this far." She met the cat's solemn gaze, and a piece of the puzzle that was Gary Hobson lined itself up, ready to click into place. "It isn't your fault, you know."

He slid his hand, gloveless now, like hers, into the space on the bench between them. "It's not yours, either. I'm serious about putting that in my report."

"Thanks, but I meant what happened to your sister." 

There was a long silence, broken only by the snapping logs, before he said, "I don't think it's my fault. I was just a kid."

But he did. It was why he'd been working overtime to save her sorry butt, trusting a paranormal cat to get them both back to their families. "Kids blame themselves for things they can't control. They think their parents' divorces happen because they don't keep their rooms clean."

"I didn't think—" He sighed. "Maybe I did. I was a kid. She walked out that door and I never saw her again. None of it made sense."

"Kind of like your cat." Toni shifted and felt her phone shift with her. She pulled it out from under her coat, but it was completely dead. She thought of Cassie Hobson, and of good-byes, and of the messages she wished she could send to her parents, her brothers, her niece and nephews. "What was the last thing you said to her?"

A grumpy note crept into his voice. "You've been spending too much time with Marissa. You sound just like her."

"Don't use your only friend to deflect my question."

"I'm not. And she's not my only friend!"

"She's gonna be if you keep hiding stuff from the rest of us."

"Damn it, Brigatti." He stood up and limped over to the kitchen cabinet, rifling through it as though some new source of distraction would appear. Kind of like his cat did. 

Toni wanted to force an answer out of him. But she also wanted to close her eyes. She slid off the bench so she could sit closer to the fire and rest her back against it while the legs of her jeans dried.

* * *

Paul found a map filed with the US Geological Survey in the 1990s that showed a dirt road snaking up the opposite side of the mountain from the one where they'd found the wreckage. Someone had been there, by foot or by four-wheeler, but there wasn't any indication of when it had last been used, and there wasn't any more recent map with which to compare it.

"Still, it's remotely plausible that they found it," Paul said. 

"Buried in the snow, on the other side of the mountain?" Ingrid asked. "Look, guys, I want to believe. But we need more than remotely plausible."

"Any word yet from your retired friend?" Marissa asked.

"He isn't responding to phone or radio calls. He's usually on his ham radio every night," Ingrid told her. "The guy is a real throwback. Half feral ever since he took his pension. Even when he was with the service, he knew all the squatters and dropouts who spent time off the grid on federal land. If one of them has a place up on your mountain, he'll know about it."

"I hope so," Marissa said. Right now Joe Kingston seemed like their only hope of finding Gary and Toni alive. 

Which they had to be. Anything else was simply unacceptable. She sent up another prayer to God or the universe or whoever was listening to make sure they understood that immutable fact.

* * *

When Toni opened her eyes again, it was fully dark outside and Hobson was crouched awkwardly over the fire with his left leg extended, heating water in the kettle. She watched while he made two mugs of tea. Probably should have offered to help, but she was so drowsy, her limbs so heavy, that she knew she wouldn’t have been able to follow through. When he was done, he hesitated for a split second, watching her, before lowering himself to sit next to her on the floor, his own feet considerably closer to the fire.

He handed her one of the mugs. "Don't go." 

"Where the hell would I go tonight?"

"That's the last thing I said to Cassie." He studied his tea before he took a drink. "Everyone remembers the fight she had with my mom because it's all my mom could—can still—talk about. I think my dad is tired of hearing about it. But I was mad at Cassie because I just—" He came to a full stop. 

Toni turned to look at him, worried he was slipping out of coherence again. His jaw twitched, and he looked right at her, all cloudiness gone, she could tell even in the firelight. "You just what?"

"I knew it wasn't going to be the same in that house without her making up her plays and dragging me into stuff with her friends." A gust of wind rattled the walls and made the roof creak, and his voice softened, as if he was trying to calm the storm. "I knew once she left for college, she wasn't coming back, not in any way that mattered. I didn't have a bad childhood. I had a great one. And I knew it would be over when she left. I woke up that morning knowing nothing would ever be the same."

"That's normal, Hobson." She hoped she sounded reassuring. "Families change as you get older, and you were old enough to see how Cassie going to college would affect your family and your own childhood."

"But how it affected me wasn't normal. A plane crash isn't normal." He gulped down more tea and shot a glare at the cat. "And what I felt that day, even before the crash happened, that wasn't normal either."

Toni sipped at the tea, which was barely flavored and a little oily. She didn't know what to say, but she figured at this point it would be better to let him talk, rather than pointing out that he was definitely not _not_ talking about his feelings.

"I had this feeling that something really bad was going to happen. It was like there was a thunderstorm rolling in even though it was sunny outside. I'd never felt that way before, and I didn't know what to do with it. I asked her not to go, but I didn't tell her why. She gave me a hug, said she'd call, and went out the door with Dad. I should have told her. She always trusted my feelings."

Toni let quiet settle again, stunned by the depth of what Hobson had revealed, whether he realized it or not. "So it's not just the cat," she finally said cautiously. "You've always had these feelings?"

"Not as much as I have in the past year or so, but yeah." He went to take another drink of his tea, and blinked down at the mug, which Toni could see was empty. "I never told anyone that before. That part about what I felt that morning."

"Not even Marissa?"

"Nope. I never saw the point before now. What good was that feeling, or premonition, or whatever you want to call it, if it can't tell me why her plane went down?"

"Hobson, when you got that feeling about Europa 679, or the one about the private jet in Charleston, did it feel the same as the one you had the morning Cassie left?"

"Maybe." He met her eyes and nodded. "Yeah, but I saw those. Because the cat was there. I never saw anything about Cassie's plane. You think that's some kind of mental block?"

"Honestly? I think you don't need to be dealing with visions of what happened to your sister's plane. Wherever all this is coming from, that is too much to ask."

His sigh was pure relief and release. "Thanks for saying that."

Toni squinted at the cat, its fur seeming to glow in the firelight. "I know the cat is real." Though she didn't understand why, now that they were warming up, she didn't feel any allergy symptoms at all. "But everything surrounding it is so weird. Do you think it's some kind of manifestation of those feelings?"

"Marissa thinks so."

"What do you think?" What did _she_ think? 

He seemed to be asking her the same thing when he searched her eyes, looking for—for condemnation, she thought. For blame, the same way she'd been looking for it from him about the crash. "I think I have to figure out how to live with this. How to use the feelings, or the cat, or whatever it is, to do this job, instead of fighting against it all." He winced and rubbed his temple. "I'm really tired of fighting, you know?"

"I think so." She took the mug out of his hands and set it on the floor, then scooted closer and wrapped an arm around him. He rested his head against the back of the bench until she drew it down to her shoulder, ignoring the twinge it elicited. "Get some rest, Hobson. You deserve it."

"We both do," he mumbled. "You know, Brigatti, I really wanna kiss you again sometime. Just need a nap first."

"Sounds good."

He let out a sigh, then a snore, leaving her wide awake despite her exhaustion. She hadn't known it was possible to feel both at the same time, but paradoxes, she was learning, were to be expected around Gary Hobson.

* * *

By late afternoon, the decision was made to send most of the SAR team home, or to the hotel across the street from the airport, to get some rest. The storm raged fiercely, with snowfall of over an inch an hour and winds stronger than the night before. A skeleton crew that included Jekins, Ingrid, Doug Fields, the airport director, and everyone from NTSB remained, monitoring radio traffic and checking their cell phones in the fading hope that Gary and Toni would end up somewhere with service.

When Miguel came in from the hanger, where he'd been tinkering with ODD, Marissa brought him a fresh cup of coffee and they sat together at the radio table. 

"Isn't this kind of…" He trailed off, sounding too tired to even finish the sentence. "I mean, fetching coffee isn't supposed to be your job."

"It's not a job thing. It's a friend thing." Gary brought her coffee from her favorite local shop a couple mornings a week, when they were in the office. A lump lodged itself in her throat.

"Thanks," Miguel said. "It's nasty out there again. Even in the hanger. Gonna take a while to warm up." After a few minutes listening to the radio cackling, he asked, "You want to tell me what we're waiting for? 'Cause I got a close look at the console in that Clipper and even if they're near the plane, somehow, there's no way its radio is ever going to work again." 

"We're waiting to hear from a retired forest ranger who might know about places on that mountain where they could be taking shelter." She explained about Joe Kingston. 

"Cool. If he has any ideas we can get ODD up and searching again in the morning."

"Miguel, when you were looking at the wreckage, you looked for any trace of them, right? _Any_ trace?"

"What kind of NTSB agent do you take me for? You guys like to keep me chained up in the basement, but I know what to look for in the field."

"So there was no blood, nothing that might have been—" She swallowed hard. "—them?"

His coffee mug clanked on the table. "There were no human remains. I promise I looked. My professional opinion is that they weren't in that Clipper when it landed in that ravine."

"Thank you." She had believed that, but it was heartening to have confirmation.

"You really think they walked out of there without a scratch?"

"I don't know about 'without a scratch,' but I do think they survived the initial crash. I just hope they've found a place to shelter."

"If they did, ODD can find them. We just need to know where to look. So what are we doing about that?"

Paul showed him the road from the 90s and a few other promising leads he'd found in the survey data. Marissa went to walk Reilly around the airport, brushing off offers to help her find her way. Reilly, who had no problem guiding her through crowded streets and buildings in downtown DC, was more than capable of keeping her on a clear path through the deserted airport. She needed to be alone for a few minutes; she needed to move and she needed to breathe. 

She left her phone in the conference room. She'd already updated the Hobsons and Brigattis several times that day, still walking the line between giving them false hope and not letting them fall into despair. 

Her footsteps, and Reilly's, echoed weirdly in the vacant space. When she passed an exit, the sliding glass door opened automatically, letting in wind and stinging snow. Reilly let out a whine that reminded her he hadn't had a chance to relieve himself since the storm had returned. "Okay, boy, but just for a minute." 

In the brief time it took to walk a respectful distance from the door and let Reilly do his business, she could feel her hopes for Toni and Gary lag. The wind and cold cut into her lungs, even though they were protected by an overhang. It was less than a minute before they were back inside, and still she was chilled through. Even if they had winter gear with them, it seemed impossible that they'd survive a night of this. 

But they had to. She couldn't make a phone call reporting anything else to their families. She couldn't face going in to the NTSB offices, or out on cases, without Toni's practical attention to detail and Gary's big-picture intuition. Without semi-weekly lattes from Compass Coffee. Without them.

When she returned to the conference room, Ingrid was on the phone with Joe Kingston. The side of the conversation she could hear consisted mostly of Ingrid trying to convince him that they weren't planning to arrest anyone for having illegal cabins in the national forest.

"This isn't a sting operation, Joe, not in the middle of a damn blizzard. Look, I know you listen to radio chatter. You heard our team out there this morning…The drone wasn't looking for poachers!"

Marissa followed the sound of Ingrid's voice and got close enough to touch her arm. "Can I speak to him?"

"I don't—" Ingrid blew out a sigh of frustration and put the phone in her hand. "Give it a shot."

"Mr. Kingston, my name is Marissa Clark. I work for the NTSB."

His voice sounded like it was clogged with gravel. "Don't know you, don't care."

"I understand." This was what she did best; talk to people and understand them. "You don't want anything to do with us, and you don't want to betray any friend by telling us they're squatting on federal land. But the NTSB isn't like other federal agencies. We don't press charges. We're not in the blame business. We just want to know if our colleagues have a chance of making it through the night."

"That's up to them, isn't it? Don't know why you come to me about this."

"Because you know more about this area than anyone. You keep its secrets. I know a little something about that. But Mr. Kingston, I also spend a lot of time talking to people who want me to make promises. Usually I can't. But right now, tonight, I can promise you that if you tell us where to look for our people, we will all, every single one of us, keep your name out of it and forget anything you tell us once we get them off that mountain."

"I'm not giving you coordinates. I'm not—"

"Mr. Kingston!" Her voice bounced off the walls of the conference room, and she was sure everyone left was listening. "It's admirable that you want to protect your friends, but think about the cost. Our friends have been on that mountain for over twenty-four hours. They might be hurt. Do you want it on your conscience if we can't find them in time? Because I can tell you, I certainly don't want it on mine. Please," she added, more softly, "we need some hope to get through the night."

He sighed. "Gimme Faust."

Ingrid took the phone back and listened, thanked him, and hung up.

"There are a couple places on the mountain. He couldn't give me coordinates, but he thinks the closest is a few miles southeast of the crash site as the crow flies."

"Or the drone," Miguel said. "We'll send her up at sunrise." For the second time that evening, Miguel's words put a lump in her throat.

"That was more than anyone's gotten out of Joe since he retired. Maybe longer," Ingrid said. "How did you know what to say to him?"

"It's my training. Excuse me for a minute, I need to—" To get out of the room before everyone saw her melt down in relief. "Forward, Reilly." She barely got the command out, barely made it out of the conference room, before the lump in her throat pushed out a sob. She made it a little way down the hall before she stopped and leaned against the wall, giving in to the need to release everything. Reilly pressed against her leg as if he trying to hold her up.

The door of the conference room opened and closed; heavy footsteps approached. "All day long you hold it together, and now you gotta cry?" 

"I'm sorry, Crumb." She gulped back all the sobs that threatened to escape. "It just all hit me at once. I promise I'll pull myself together." But now that the tears had found a way out, she couldn't stop them. 

"I was kidding." Crumb put a hand on her shoulder, a gesture so kind that she choked on another sob. "You need to fall apart? You go right ahead. You've earned it. Hell, we all have. C'mere." He wrapped his arms around her and, after a moment of shock, she gave in and slumped against him.

"You did great in there," he said. "You fought for your team. You've been holding us all up, holding us together, since this whole thing started. Don't think I don't notice. Let the rest of us do it for you when you need it, okay? It's the only way through this job."

She sniffled into his shirt and nodded.

"We're gonna find them." Crumb squeezed her a little tighter. "Just gotta hold on 'til morning."

* * *

Toni woke Hobson a handful of times during the night, both to check on his symptoms and to make sure they both ate something. She didn't trust her stomach, or her body, to be sending her accurate signals. They shared one of the MREs and some of Hobson's sunflower seeds sometime in the middle of the night, or what felt like it. The storm howled at the thin walls of the shack, and when she tried to get outside for the last of the firewood, she had to fight both the wind and the drifted snow to get the door open wide enough for her to slip through.

They talked while they ate, mostly about her family. Any mention of his felt fraught at this point. Hobson seemed relatively coherent, if she didn't count him constantly wanting to know where his cat was. He didn't seem to have the same trouble she did with getting to sleep, but this time he woke easily if she shook his shoulder or called his name. She knew concussions could be tricky, with symptoms seeming to recede and then coming back with a vengeance. She wouldn't be sure until he had a CT. 

For its part, the cat kept a respectful distance, sitting in a gloomy corner near the fireplace. Whenever Toni glanced its way, its eyes glinted in the firelight, turned in her direction. She felt like it was gauging her ability to take care of Hobson. At first, she didn't pay it much attention, but as the night went on and the cat kept its silent, judge-y vigil, she started to get a little unnerved.

"You think you're gonna scare me away or something?" she finally asked it as she placed the last log on top of the fire's glowing embers. The last time she'd lifted Hobson's wrist to check his watch, it had been close to four in the morning. This last bit of the fire could keep them warm until sunrise, and by then, surely the storm would have spent itself. "I'm surviving a plane crash here. I'll survive your paranormal…whatever it is."

"Visions," Hobson mumbled. He was half-sitting, half-slumping against the bench with his arms crossed over his chest. 

"Whatever it is, I'm not afraid of it," she said. "Or of you."

"Good to know. Come on, Brigatti, let's get some sleep."

"You've had plenty."

"Yeah, but I'm the only one here who has." He patted the spot next to him on the floor. 

"I can't sleep with your cat staring at me. It's judging me!"

Hobson sat up. Had a stare down through the near dark with his cat. "I don't think he's judging you. I think he's keeping watch over us. Just like last night. He'll let us know if this lean-to is about to roll down the mountain."

"This place has been here for years. It's not going anywhere."

"All the more reason to sleep. Come on, let's share some body heat before we have to wade through another layer of snow."

She groaned. Her legs ached at the thought of it. Maybe sleep wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Maybe it was possible, she thought once she sat down next to Hobson. He pushed in close to her and rearranged the foil blanket so that it covered all of her legs and one and a half of his. And maybe, she thought as she drifted off to the crackle of the log and the glint of the cat's eyes, maybe it was going to be hard to sleep without Hobson next to her once they got out of this mess.

She mustn't have slept very long. When she woke up, the fire was all coals and embers, but it was still throwing off some heat. The wind had stopped; the windows were caked with snow, filtering faint morning light. Hobson stirred when she stood up, but he didn't wake. She picked up the kettle, intending to fill it with snow and warm, if not boil, some water for tea to fortify them for the cold walk ahead. 

The storm had ended, but not before it had drifted snow nearly shoulder height against the door. She pushed at it, grunting. 

"Toni?" Hobson called blearily. "What are you doing? Here, let me help." Together they forced the door through the snow. Not enough that either one of them could get out unless they went sideways, and even then they'd have to break through the drift with their bodies. 

Toni's heart sank. At this rate, they'd exhaust themselves before they got more than a few feet from the cabin. 

Hobson must have known what she was thinking. "We can do this," he told her. "We'll warm ourselves up and eat something, first, and Cat—"

"Brigatti? Hobson?"

They stared at each other. The whine of a small motor sounded overhead. She looked up, and saw a small drone hovering just above the snow-covered pine trees.

"Was that Diaz?" Hobson asked. "How the hell did he get here from DC?"

"If you guys are in there, give me some kind of sign. ODD can hear you. We can all hear you!"

"We're here!" Toni called, while Hobson scooped through the snow, throwing a lot of it back into the cabin and onto her. She didn't care. "Miguel, we're here!" And then, because he'd said they were all listening, and that meant her team, she added, "We're all right!"

"I read you," Miguel said as Hobson broke through the drift and waved an arm toward the sky. "Hold tight. We're gonna get you out."

* * *

Something about crying in her boss's arms made it easier for Marissa to get some sleep. Once she'd let herself be vulnerable once, she was able to trust that she could drop her vigilance long enough to close her eyes and let the world slip away. It would be waiting in the morning, with Toni and Gary in it. The team rested on airport-issued cots until five-thirty, when Miguel and the SAR team headed back to the mountain with ODD. Marissa was on her second cup of coffee when Miguel yelped over the radio.

"We found them!" 

"Right where Ranger Joe said they'd be," Crumb said. 

" _Ex_ -Ranger Joe," Ingrid reminded him.

"Screw details," Marissa said vehemently. "Are they alive? Are they okay?"

"Seems like it. They're gonna have a heck of a time digging themselves out, but SAR says they can get a couple of snowmobiles up here to bring them to the ranger station."

The cheer that went up in the conference room must have been audible through the entire Bradford Regional Airport. Marissa felt more like crying than cheering, but she had two phone calls to make before she could do either.

Paul touched her arm as she tried to slip out to the hallway to call Gary and Toni's families. "Good call," he said.

"These really are the best ones."

"Well, yeah, but that's not what I meant." He drew in a breath. "You made a good call last night, and the night before. You were right to believe, and you were right to tell us why. I'll make sure Hobson knows you only told us about the cat under duress."

"You're still going to give him shit about it, aren't you?"

"Is that a problem?"

"I don't think he'd have it any other way." Which wasn't exactly the truth, but she had a feeling once his secret was out in the open, Gary would find it easier to connect with the whole team about the cat, about Cassie, and about himself. He'd forgive her for spilling the beans, even if it took a while. The important thing was that he'd be around to do it.

It was almost noon when SAR radioed to say they had reached the cabin. No one called it illegal and, true to their word, no one who'd been in the conference room the night before would reveal how they'd known about it to the rest of the team. The lead on site said they'd take Toni and Gary to the closest ranger's station, where they could warm up and meet up with a truck that could get them to the hospital to get checked out.

He also wanted to know what he was supposed to do about the cat.

* * *

The ranger's outpost wasn't much bigger than the shack had been, but it had heat and a working microwave, and it sat on a gravel road that led to civilization. To Toni, after a teeth-rattling ride down the mountain on a snowmobile that felt just as cold as trudging through a blizzard, the place was heaven.

She and Hobson downed canned chicken noodle soup and crackers while they waited for a vehicle that would take them on the next leg of their journey home. They were headed to a hospital to get checked for frostbite. "And a concussion," Toni insisted. "His, not mine."

Who was going to take them there was a matter of debate between the two snowmobilers who'd rescued them, a volunteer firefighter named Bob Brand and a park ranger named Rob Nelson. They left Toni and Gary to eat while they bounced ideas back and forth and checked with park maintenance on the status of the roads to the nearest town. 

"Fireman Bob and Ranger Rob," Hobson whispered with a somewhat demented grin. "Sounds like a kids' book."

"I don't care if they're Captain Crunch and Tony the Tiger." Toni said between gulps of soup. She was tempted to drink it straight out of the bowl. "They fed us, and they're getting us home."

"Yeah, and, uh—" He put down his spoon and gazed at her seriously. "And then what? I mean, with us?"

She blew a breath out the side of her mouth. "I'm not your cat." Which was currently under the table circling their legs. Hobson had clutched it to his chest on the snowmobile down the mountain. "We aren't keeping this secret from the rest of the team. We can't, not after everything they've done for us."

"I like that there's an us," he said with that infuriating, irresistible grin. "Though it is a hell of a way to start a relationship."

Was that what they were doing? "What does that mean?"

"If you wanted to get my attention, Brigatti, there are easier ways than crashing a plane with both of us in it. Not to mention my cat." 

"Oh do let's mention your cat." Which was currently rubbing against her ankle and purring. Not making her sneeze. "So now we're…what? Teammates?"

He cocked his head. "We've been that for a while. Think we can be more?"

"I like the idea of more. But for now, let's keep our feet on the ground."

He nudged the cat away from her foot to touch his boot to hers. "For now."

"Here's the truck," Bob—or maybe Rob—called from his station by the window. 

Before Toni could even bring her exhausted legs to stand, Marissa, Crumb, Paul, Miguel, and Reilly had spilled into the station. She was caught up in smiles and back pats and hugs, none tighter than Marissa's. "I'm so glad you're okay. You're okay, right?"

"Okay enough," Toni managed. She hadn't expected to be overwhelmed by the sight of her coworkers, but she could barely get the assurance past the sudden catch in her throat. 

"You did good," Crumb told her gruffly. "Not sure how you two walked away from that, but you deserve a commendation."

"How'd you all get here?" Hobson asked. "And where's Winslow?"

"Holding down the fort," Crumb said. "Armstong's mini van could only fit the four of us on the trip up from DC."

"Five," said Marissa. "Including Reilly."

"Actually, it's six." Miguel beamed. "Gotta count ODD. She saved your butts."

"But why?" Toni asked.

"See, she has infrared sensors, and we heard about the cabin—"

"Save it for the ride, Diaz," Crumb said.

Marissa seemed to be the only one who'd understood Toni's question. "We came because we couldn't _not_ come. Because you're our team."

"What she said." Crumb started for the door. "Let's get to the hospital, we can tell you the whole story. I assume that cat's coming too?"

Hobson blanched, meeting Toni's eyes with a look of panic, despite the conversation they'd had about secrets. Buoyed by the chicken soup and the reunion, she made a quick calculation and flashed him a grin of her own. "Yes, sir, he is. We have room for him, right?"

"I thought you were allergic," Paul said, with a knowing glint in his eyes that made her wonder who knew what.

"Seems to have cleared up, at least for now." 

Marissa reached out, found Toni's hand, and squeezed it. "Plenty of room on this team. Let's go home."

* * *

The hospital in Bradford released Toni within an hour with a recommendation that she talk to her own doctor about physical therapy for her shoulder. Gary, however, was taken away to be scanned for a concussion.

"It's about time he got his head examined," Paul joked, but no one in the waiting room laughed.

After what seemed like hours, Marissa talked her way up to the room where they'd stashed Gary to monitor him while they processed the scan. The nurse who led her there snapped at Gary to "get back in bed and don't move that skull until we know it's all in one piece" when he tried to get Marissa a chair.

"I'm fine, Gary, don't worry about me," she said when the nurse left them alone in the room. Reilly sat next to the bed and Marissa put one hand on the railing. "You're the one who—" Who'd been lost. Who could have died. 

He touched her hand. "I'm okay. What about Brigatti?"

"Toni's cold and exhausted, but she'll be fine." Physically, at least. "It's a miracle both of you survived."

"Yeah, we did." He didn't sound entirely happy about that, but that could have been him feeling overwhelmed. He pulled his hand away. "Mom and Dad know?"

She nodded. "They want to come out to see you this weekend." When he didn't respond, she added, "You should have heard them. They're so relieved, so grateful. You need to call them as soon as you get out of here."

"Yeah." 

"They need to hear your voice." When Gary, who knew better than anyone that she needed an audible response, didn't say anything, she said, "Okay, spill. What's eating you?"

"I don't know why. Why me, why Brigatti. Why the cat." He drew in a loud breath, and it came out with a hitch that surprised her. "Why not Cassie?"

"Oh, Gary." She reached out and found his hand; gripped it despite the tubing from one of the monitors attached to his finger. "I don't know. None of us can know. That isn't the kind of question you should hold on to."

"No?" She couldn't tell if the tension in his voice was because he was annoyed with her, or because he was trying to keep something wilder at bay. "What kind of question should I be asking then? Maybe it doesn't matter." Despite his bitter tone, he squeezed her hand tight. "Not like I have any answers anyway."

"Don't you?"

"All I have is a mystical cat who makes me look like a weirdo and makes Brigatti sneeze."

Concussion or no concussion, she wasn't going to let him wallow in self-pity. "You have a _future_ , Gary. Whoever or whatever gave it to you isn't as important as what you do with it. Maybe this happened to show you that. And maybe Toni was there with you when it happened because she's a part of that future."

For once, he didn't push the idea away with a joke. His grip on her hand didn't loosen as they took a few deep breaths together. "Maybe," he finally said. 

"You have a lot to work out, but you're here to do it. Can we be glad about that for now? Because for a good chunk of the past couple days, I was the only one who believed either of you would be."

"Okay." Some of the tension went out of his voice. "Thanks."

A knock on the door announced the nurse. "Your CT came back clear. They're going to give you some protocols to track any symptoms, but once you talk to the doctor, you'll be released. Just don't let these guys put you on a plane anytime soon."

"Funny. She's very funny," he said dryly.

"Don't worry," Marissa told him. "We have a plan to get you home."

* * *

The NTSB didn't immediately issue Toni a commendation, despite what Crumb had said, but there wasn't a condemnation, either. Then again, as Hobson reminded her wryly, they were a government agency. They rarely did anything immediately. Instead, over the next few weeks there was a seemingly endless series of interviews with higher-ups while Hobson was monitored for any lingering effects of the concussion, and a recommendation that both of them take some paid time off and have sessions with counselor. It made sense, and if it would get her back in the field, she'd do whatever they asked. Still, she preferred the early morning chats she had with Marissa once they let her come back to the office. They both were morning people, so they fell into the habit of meeting in the break room first thing in the morning, ostensibly to grab a cup of coffee or tea to take back to their desks, but often to talk about everything or nothing before the rest of the team showed up.

With Marissa, Toni didn't have to tiptoe around mysterious cats and her blossoming relationship, if that was what it was, with Hobson. Other team members were at varying points of acceptance of the former, and of realizing what was happening of the latter. For his part, Crumb seemed to be waiting to see how it all played out when they were back on active duty. But with Marissa she could say anything she needed to about either subject, or avoid them altogether if that was where her head was on that particular day.

"My mom says hi," she told Marissa one morning in February, her second week into desk duty. The hum of the vending machine and the microwave that was heating up water for tea were starting to feel like prerequisites for comfortable conversation. Maybe her shrink could play a recording during her next appointment. "She wants to know when you're going to San Diego so she can make you birra and tamales. I don't think she cares if I come with you or not."

"Of course she does," Marissa said lightly. "I'll wait until you can take us. Any word on when they're going to re-certify you?"

Toni shrugged. As much as she wanted to put what had happened in Pennsylvania in the past, she knew she hadn't yet. "I have to get to the point where I can trust a plane again, not to mention the laws of physics. And myself." Dr. Haddison had called it a breakthrough when she'd admitted as much to him. "Maybe next week, maybe next month. Then I have to convince the higher ups that they can trust me, too. If they ever do."

"They will if Crumb has anything to say about it."

The microwave dinged at the same moment the door slid open, admitting Hobson. And his cat. 

"I didn't invite him," he said at Toni's questioning look. He hadn't taken his coat off, and he had a coffee carrier with three huge cups. "He was waiting for me in the elevator. You okay with him being here?" He asked the question every time she and the cat were in close proximity, but since that long night in the mountain cabin where the cat had, as Hobson said, watched over them, Toni hadn't felt more than a sniffle in its presence. Which only deepened the mystery surrounding it, but she was getting comfortable with having an unexplained element in her life. 

"Depends on whether one of those is for me." She hoped her grin wasn't as doofy-looking as his. "And if it's something stronger than mircrowaved tea." 

He pulled one of the cups from the holder and offered it to her. The tingle when their fingers brushed made her cheeks as warm as whatever was in the cup. "Cortado with a shot of espresso."

"You told him, didn't you?" Toni asked Marissa. They'd talked about their favorite caffeine delivery systems a couple days ago.

"More than once." Marissa took the latte Hobson handed her, and a hint of cinnamon wafted through the air. "He needs a few reminders at first, but once he gets your order right, he'll cling to it like grim death. God forbid if you want to mix it up once in a while."

"You're hilarious," Hobson told her. They all sat at a table, Reilly and the cat filling up the space between their feet. 

Toni took a sip, then a long swallow. It was strong enough to get her going, with a scent that whispered of warmer climates, and solidly in the window between scalding and too cool. "This is really good. Where did you find it?"

"Compass Coffee, a few blocks over."

"It's the only place that makes a proper latte in a two-mile radius," Marissa said. Her smile took on a wicked glint, and Hobson started just as one of the furballs crammed up against Toni's foot shifted a little. 

Toni's suspicion that Marissa had kicked Hobson under the table was confirmed when he asked, "Would you like to see it for yourself, Brigat—" Another jump. "Uh, Toni? We could go there sometime. Maybe together?"

Marissa rolled her eyes, but Toni was willing to give Hobson—no, Gary, she'd have to get used to his throwback first name along with everything else—credit for getting that much out. For everything they'd gone through together, once they were back in DC their time had been more than filled with dealing with the aftermath. Whatever was between them was still there, though, and she was glad he'd made the first move, however awkward.

She let her grin soften, and nodded. "I'd like that. Maybe Saturday? We could hit up the Smithsonian."

"Which one?"

"Do you seriously have to ask?" She took another long sip of her drink, and it was more than just right. It was perfect. "Air and Space, all the way."

_~finis~_

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the song [Here Tonight, by Dar Williams](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFvRCKfI4Ac).


End file.
